Date: April 18, 2011

"And so it goes, researchers say, with most study sessions: difficulty builds mental muscle, while ease often builds only confidence."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: May 23, 2011

"Learning isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think."

— Deresiewicz, William (b. 1964)

Date: May 21, 2011

"My thoughts turn into the cowbirds wandering among the horses’ hooves."

— Klinkenbourg, Verlyn (b. 1952)

Date: June 4, 2011

"My desk faces a wall covered with images, notes, timelines, vaudeville photographs and playbills; my keyboard sits in a small black space surrounded by piles of books and paper -- the brain disgorged and arrayed."

— Endicott, Marina (b. 1958)

Date: June 14, 2011

"Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: June 14, 2011

"According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: June 14, 2011

"But they usually assume that the purpose of reasoning is to help an individual arrive at the truth, and that irrationality is a kink in that process, a sort of mental myopia."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: June 14, 2011

"They are a result of the way that the brain, a Rube Goldberg mental contraption, processes memory."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: Winter 2011

"I'm doing a reading that night and so is Jean but in different places and I don't know how to reach her or Andrew or the vague choir of boys swimming in my mind or why I even need to reach the vague choir (except for another fix of beauty)."

— Klein, Michael

Date: July 30, 2011

"I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was 10, but I think that having all those books and sentences composting in my brain may have pushed me toward becoming a writer in the long run."

— Meloy, Maile (born January 1, 1972)