Date: March 31, 2009

"Brains have long been compared to the most advanced existing technology--including, at one point, telephone switchboards."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"Today people talk about brains as if they were a sort of biological computer, with pink mushy 'hardware' and 'software' generated by life experiences."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"Our colleague David Linden has compared the evolutionary history of the brain to the task of building a modern car by adding parts to a 1925 Model T that never stops running."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"As smart as we are, in this sense we are all dim bulbs."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"We use emotions, the brain's steersman, to assign value to our experiences and to future possibilities, often allowing us to evaluate potential outcomes efficiently and rapidly when information is uncertain."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: April 2, 2009

"Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar."

— Holt, Jim

Date: 2009

"These are some of the things // you don't have to know because the melody / is like a small bird, maybe a yellow canary, / that wings its way into your mind / --no, into your heart-- / where there's a perch already // set up for it, a little trapeze / to swing back and forth on as it sings / and...

— Raab, Lawrence (b. 1946)

Date: 2009

"As far as I can tell, Quine’s philosophical and political thinking were conducted in two different and hermetically sealed off compartments of his mind."

— Feser, Edward (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"As all the thoughts and images of consciousness began to move in directions over which I had no control, and I seemed to be lying there watching them, like a kind of lazy sheepdog of the mind, I knew sleep was around the corner."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)