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: 1984

"Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print literate."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

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: 1990

"The soul too / is a debasement / of a text, but, thus, it / acquires salience, although a / human salience, but / inimitable, and, hence, memorable."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1992

"Even more important to David than the very natural worry that his wife and his son might grow fond of one another was the intoxicating feeling that he had a blank consciousness to work with, and it gave him great pleasure to knead this yielding clay with his artistic thumbs."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1993

"I didn't need to speak, I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet."

— Campion, Jane (b. 1954)

Date: 1996

"Each one of my thoughts was being ghostwritten / By anonymous authors."

— Simic, Charles (b. 1938)

Date: 1998

"The thought scrolled round and round in his mind--it went well, it went well."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)