Date: October 31, 2011

"It does so amid a cacophony of competing voices, the neural equivalent of open outcry at the Chicago Board of Trade."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: October 31, 2011

"The brain’s cacophony of competing voices feels coherent because some module or network somewhere in the left hemisphere is providing a running narration."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

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)

Date: March 9, 2012

"If we acquire a bad habit this way it is very hard to change, because its grooves are so well worn in our minds."

— Wilson, Timothy D.

Date: March 17, 2012

"It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles."

— Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit

Date: April 15, 2012

"If the child's mind was a tabula rasa — a clean slate upon which, as Mao Zedong once put it, 'the most beautiful characters could be written' -- then a person's character and mind-set would not be immutable and God-given, but shaped and honed in the environment."

— Smits, Rick

Date: May 7, 2012

"The fear gets released later on, while I'm falling asleep and near-misses replay themselves in my mind's eye like an endless computer game fraught with constant hazards, in which I'm a disembodied Steadicam hurtling through busy city streets at the same speed something falls, pedestrians appeari...

— Kreider, Tim (b. 1967)

Date: May 7, 2012

"If you're anything like me, you probably spend the majority of your time either second-guessing the past or dreading the future, neither of which actually exists; having to navigate those teeming streets narrows the beam of my consciousness to the laser's width of the instant I actually inhabit."

— Kreider, Tim (b. 1967)

Date: May 7, 2012

"When I'm balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in."

— Kreider, Tim (b. 1967)

Date: May 3, 2012

"A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)