Date: February 25, 2010

"There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: February 25, 2010

"Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose."

— Lehrer, Jonah

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: February 25, 2010

"This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: 2010

"A thought to mind, so to the string / plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is, / a wrinkling of the air as immaterial / and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)

Date: 2010

"Yet as I lift up this / dull desert stone, the weight of it is full / of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)

Date: 2010

"Be my mind, stone lying on my grave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)

Date: 2010

"You've put it in the book and in reading it my brain is having a response like 'things as they are are really part of the world and I forgot.' How nice to just feel them roll over the brain! It's like a brain massage!"

— Gallagher, Kirsten

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: February 15, 2011

"If you want to use a memory palace for permanent storage, you have to take periodic time-consuming mental strolls through it to keep your images from fading."

— Foer, Joshua