Date: January 11, 2014

"One day, scientists might be able to successfully mimic the expansion of the interstitial space that does the mental janitorial work so that we can achieve maximally efficient round-the-clock brain trash pickup."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: January 11, 2014

"It's [concerning sleep loss] like the difference between a snowstorm's disrupting a single day of trash pickup and a prolonged strike. No longer quite as easy to fix, and even when the strike is over, there's likely to be some stray debris floating around for quite some time yet."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: August, 22, 2015

"Some philosophers claim that we know nothing of the external world outside our minds--nothing compared to what sways in our minds, in the long, twisting corridors of memory, the vast mental rooms with half-open doors, the ghosts chattering beneath the chandeliers of imagination."

— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)

Date: September 23, 2015

"Carson's ideas about the Big Bang are quite similar to his beliefs about Islam, in that he picked up a snippet of information somewhere -- there's a passage in the Koran that says this or that, there's a thing called entropy -- and that snippet seemed to take hold of his rational faculties and b...

— Waldman, Paul

Date: June 5, 2016

"They [brain and heart] talk like best friends via the common carotid artery, which sends blood from the heart to the brain at a running speed of three feet per second."

— Hill, Melissa

Date: July 16, 2016

"The emotions of the heroine, Riley, [in the film 'Inside Out'] are cartoon characters, and a fantastic 'Jetsons'-esque city inside her mind is a metaphor of the human psyche."

— Gabriel, Trip (b. 1955)

Date: August 27, 2016

"Think of the brain as a jam-packed sports arena and the voxels as all the fans"

— Murphy, Kate

Date: September 18, 2016

"Mr. Ackerman told me that he has designed his 'Sleep With Me' podcast to tame the vigilant, overactive 'guardian' in the brain that feels it must stay awake to worry. 'I'm trying to trick the guardian,' he said."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: November 15, 2016

"He [Trump] has set the worst human impulses marching. But there are no clean slates in the unconscious."

— Rose, Jacqueline (b. 1949)

Date: December 31, 2016

"Rather (in the words of the neuroscientist Georg Striedter), brains evolve like companies do: they reorganize as they expand."

— Barrett, Lisa Feldman (b. 1963)