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: 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

Date: February 15, 2011

"In other words, natural memory is the hardware you’re born with. Artificial memory is the software you run on it."

— Foer, Joshua

Date: 2011

"I could share an hour of warm camaraderie with Dad, then once I'd walked out the door, get the uncanny feeling I'd disappeared into the wings of his mind's stage, like a character no longer necessary to the ongoing story line."

— Reagan, Ron (b. 1958)

Date: March 10, 2011

"Richards’s sharpness is surprising coming from a guy whose mind, everyone had to assume, was by now a salvage heap."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: March 24, 2011

"It is like finding that cheese depends on chalk--that soul depends on matter."

— McGinn, Colin (b. 1950)

Date: March 24, 2011

"It [neurology] has all the fascination of a horror story--the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain."

— McGinn, Colin (b. 1950)