Date: April 25, 2011

"At U.C.L.A., Dean Buonomano believes that areas throughout the brain function as clocks, their tissue ticking with neural networks that change in predictable patterns. 'Imagine a skyscraper at night,' he told me. 'Some people on the top floor work till midnight, while some on the lower floors ma...

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: April 25, 2011

"The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, 'encased in darkness and silence,' at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, ...

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: April 25, 2011

"'I knew I had some intellectual horsepower,' he says. 'But I didn't know where my tires would catch purchase.'"

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: October 14, 2011

"To its detractors, the brain is a kludge, a hacked-up device beset with bugs, biases and self-­deceptions that undermine our decision making and well-being at every turn."

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Date: October 14, 2011

"Lately, a growing army of Chicken Littles retorts that this very plasticity has been hijacked by the Internet and other forms of technological crack that are rewiring our brains into a state of continual distraction and intellectual torpor."

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Date: October 14, 2011

"So if you find yourself stopping every 30 seconds to check your Twitter feed, your brain has no more been rewired than if you find yourself taking a break for ice cream rather than celery. Picking the more rewarding stimulus is something our brains can do perfectly well with the wiring they star...

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Date: October 14, 2011

"So what’s the right way to think about the brain? Like a piece of software stuck in permanent beta, it has its share of bugs, but its plasticity allows for frequent updates."

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Date: November 2011

"I had been a hero-worshiper of his since being zapped by his writing, the closest my brain has come to hosting a meteor shower."

— Wolcott, James (b. 1952)

Date: November 2011

"The warp drive in my brain clicked, and I remember looking up from the magazine 10 or 15 minutes later and staring through the library window to the sun-bright parking lot of the supermarket across the way, as if checking to make sure everything was still where it had been the last time I looked."

— Wolcott, James (b. 1952)

Date: December 11, 2011

"The idea that down in our foundations there lie grubby creatures like desires, or passions, or needs, or culture, is like some nightmarish madwoman in the attic, and induces the same kind of reaction that met Darwin when he too drew attention to our proximity to animals rather than to angels."

— Blackburn, Simon (b. 1944)