Date: August, 22, 2015

"Partial images slide through my mind, a scattering of words spoken. Neurobiologists say that memory isn’t the replay of a video camera, but instead a pastiche of neuronal fragments gathered from here and there, wandering smells, oddly cut visual scraps, translucent experiences laid on top of one...

— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)

Date: August, 22, 2015

"Some philosophers claim that we know nothing of the external world outside our minds--nothing compared to what sways in our minds, in the long, twisting corridors of memory, the vast mental rooms with half-open doors, the ghosts chattering beneath the chandeliers of imagination."

— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)

Date: August, 22, 2015

"And the billions of neurons go spinning their tales."

— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)

Date: August, 21, 2015

"But this summer, 'The New Yorker' published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared."

— Egan, Timothy (b. 1954)

Date: August 28, 2015

"He [Donald Trump] exults in materialistic excess with an empty sack of a soul."

— Egan, Timothy (b. 1954)

Date: September 23, 2015

"Carson's ideas about the Big Bang are quite similar to his beliefs about Islam, in that he picked up a snippet of information somewhere -- there's a passage in the Koran that says this or that, there's a thing called entropy -- and that snippet seemed to take hold of his rational faculties and b...

— Waldman, Paul

Date: September 22, 2015

"This is not to say that "Tender Torrent" wasn't "fun" (it seems to be out of print today, the most enduring form of censorship); but for me, its greatest entertainment value lay in returning it to its owner, aware of the lewd visions that seethed beneath her sunny exterior. And really, that perc...

— Schillinger, Liesl

Date: September 22, 2015

"You can shun obscene books if you like, but you can't scrub erotic fantasies from the mind's hard drive."

— Schillinger, Liesl

Date: November 7, 2015

"As Daniel Kahnemann so beautifully demonstrates in his book 'Thinking Fast and Slow,' the human mind has all sorts of wired-in cognitive shortcuts that can feel an awful lot like thinking."

— McIntyre, Lee

Date: November 14, 2015

"The venerated political strategist David Axelrod once described a presidential campaign as 'an M.R.I. for the soul.'"

— Bruni, Frank (b. 1964)