Date: 2014

"Memory is a tough place."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"The days of our childhood together were steep steps into a collapsing mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours, inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope i...

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: January 11, 2014

"As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: January 11, 2014

"How, then, does its waste — like beta-amyloid, a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease — get cleared? What happens to all the wrappers and leftovers that litter the room after any mental workout?"

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

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: March, 2014

"my good mother, // her mind     a trail of crumbs / in a woods flocked with birds."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)