Date: January 11, 2014

"'Think about a fish tank,' says Dr. Nedergaard. 'If you have a tank and no filter, the fish will eventually die. So, how do the brain cells get rid of their waste? Where is their filter?'"

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: January 11, 2014

"If the main function of sleep is to take out our neural trash, that insight could eventually enable a new understanding of both neurodegenerative diseases and regular, age-related cognitive decline."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

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: July 31, 2014

"He prints a few descriptive sentences of a couple walking together from Wharton's 'House of Mirth,' and mentally X-rays them."

— Garner, Dwight (b. 1965)

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, 2014

"A universe of information swirled around in his brain."

— Thomas, Matthew

Date: March 19, 2015

"When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the whirr and hum of thought: it feels woven of reciprocity, willing, ambition, the impulse to translate fugitive thoughts into communication with others."

— Warner, Marina (b. 1946)

Date: April 18, 2015

"My lab coat, weighing on my conscience as it hung in my closet, appeared in my mind as the clothing worn by an alien scientist from an advanced civilization who comes to apologize for abducting and using us as experimental animals."

— Gazda, Paul

Date: June 6, 2015

"I eventually wiped away my rotted thought, which suited my face as poorly as bad lighting, and we resumed our session."

— Filipacchi, Amanda (b. October 10, 1967)

Date: June 2, 2015

"Padding for the mental life, so to speak."

— Parker, James