Date: January 21, 2015

"Why aren't we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life?"

— Burkeman, Oliver (b. 1975)

Date: January 21, 2015

"Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside."

— Burkeman, Oliver (b. 1975)

Date: January 21, 2015

"Yet there's no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer."

— Burkeman, Oliver (b. 1975)

Date: February 9, 2015

"Now I know for sure that the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone."

— Alexander, Elizabeth (b. 1962)

Date: March 19, 2015

"When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the whirr and hum of thought: it feels woven of reciprocity, willing, ambition, the impulse to translate fugitive thoughts into communication with others."

— Warner, Marina (b. 1946)

Date: April 11, 2015

"About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: April 11, 2015

"Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: April 18, 2015

"My lab coat, weighing on my conscience as it hung in my closet, appeared in my mind as the clothing worn by an alien scientist from an advanced civilization who comes to apologize for abducting and using us as experimental animals."

— Gazda, Paul

Date: April 17, 2015

"In every moment, your brain consults its vast stores of knowledge and asks, 'The last time I was in a similar situation, what sensations did I encounter and how did I act?'"

— Barrett, Lisa Feldman (b. 1963)

Date: April 17, 2015

"You are, in large measure, the architect of your own experience."

— Barrett, Lisa Feldman (b. 1963)