Date: April 15, 2012

"If the child's mind was a tabula rasa — a clean slate upon which, as Mao Zedong once put it, 'the most beautiful characters could be written' -- then a person's character and mind-set would not be immutable and God-given, but shaped and honed in the environment."

— Smits, Rick

Date: July 5, 2014

"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: May 19, 2014

"Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again."

— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)

Date: May 19, 2014

"Memory 'works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page,' Loftus said in a recent speech. 'You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.'"

— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)

Date: May 19, 2014

"If misinformation can be incorporated so seamlessly into a person's recollection of an event, what becomes of the original memory? Is it completely overwritten, or merely adjusted somehow, layered with a new trace?"

— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)

Date: May 19, 2014

"I asked if she thought scientists would ever really be able to write the pain out of a patient's mind."

— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)

Date: September 1, 2014

"Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up."

— Chorost, Michael (b. 1964)

Date: March 5, 2015

"We all have crowded bookshelves in our heads crammed with texts for every person we know. They knock about in our skulls, falling off the shelves. We refer to them again and again, wearing the pages thin."

— Grossman-Heinze, Dahlia

Date: December 30, 2015

"He explained how they reached tumors that were lodged deep in the brain, which is, very loosely speaking, crumpled up like a sheet of paper, and therefore full of folds and ravines that you can push aside and move through."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

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)