Date: 1968

"This is, I think, perfectly correct. The little man [in one's head], as we might say, has in his library pamphlets entitled 'Tying One's Shoes', 'Speaking Latin', and 'Typing 'Afghanistan"', but no pamphlet entitled 'Being Intelligent' or 'Speaking Latin Fluently' or 'Typing "Afghanistan" with P...

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1972

"Proof that a Justice's mind at the time he joined the Court was a complete tabula rasa in the area of constitutional adjudication would be evidence of lack of qualification, not lack of bias."

— Rehnquist, William (1924-2005)

Date: 1975

"If learning is a generalized process whereby each brain is stamped afresh by experience, the role of natural selection must be solely to keep the tabula rasa of the brain clean and malleable."

— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)

Date: 1975

"Only small parts of the brain resemble a tabula rasa; this is true even for human beings."

— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)

Date: September, 1979

"Indeed, some philosophers have thought of intentional mental events as being inner, physical sentence (or symbol) tokens--a sort of brain writing."

— Burge, Tyler (b. 1946)

Date: November 22, 1990

"The nervous system adapts, is tailored, evolves, so that experience, will, sensibility, moral sense, and all that one would call personality or soul becomes engraved in the nervous system."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Date: 1999

"Working memory has been called the 'chalkboard of the mind.'"

— Siegel, Dan J. (b. 1957)

Date: 2002

"Meaning derives from the linkages among these representations with others spread throughout the cortical system in a vast associational network, similar to a dictionary or a relational database."

— Crick, Francis (1916-2004) and Christof Koch (b. 1956)

Date: 2003

"In fact, it seems quite plausible that some version of this axiom (perhaps 'Even a paranoid can have enemies,' uttered by Henry Kissinger) is so indelibly inscribed in the brains of baby boomers that it offers us the continuing illusion of possessing a special insight into the epistemologies of ...

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: 2004

"Nature provides a first draft, which experience revises."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)