Date: 2007

"One's collection comes to symbolize the contents of one's mind."

— Updike, John (1932-2009)

Date: 2007

"Books externalize our brains, and turn our homes into thinking bodies."

— Updike, John (1932-2009)

Date: May 10, 2009

"Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes."

— Suderman, Peter

Date: 2010

"His cell was a concrete box six feet by ten with one window and a steel door with a slot wide enough to slip his hands through but that was all, and most of the time he just lay there on his cot, his mind so blank it was like a pail with nothing in it."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"The sentences were as clear in his mind as if written there."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"The idea of sex with a woman, of 'having a lesbian lover,' was simply unthinkable, like living alone at the North Pole or deciding to become a lycanthrope. If the thought existed at all, it was a mote, a sweet nothing--a little 'feather on the breath of God,' barely sensed now and then, but most...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: February 25, 2010

"That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to 'work' with all the information stuck in consciousness."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: 2011

"In contrast, '50 First Dates' utilizes Hawaii as a kind of blank slate, a place emptied of political turmoil and a perfect metaphor for the state of mind produced by the erasure of memory."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: September 5, 2011

"He [Derek Parfit] pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up...

— MacFarquhar, Larissa

Date: October 31, 2011

"The interpreter [the left-brain narrating system] creates the illusion of a meaningful script, as well as a coherent self."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)