Date: January 3, 2016

"It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: May 28, 2016

"The human brain is a pattern-matching machine."

— Vanderbilt, Tom (b. 1968)

Date: July 22, 2016

"All thought uses neural circuitry. Every idea is constituted by neural circuitry. But we have no conscious access to that circuitry."

— Lakoff, George P. (b. 1941)

Date: August 31, 2016

"He therefore ignores the observation that circuits of our brains are devoted to processing language, while different parts deal with non-linguistic sounds and with general reasoning and problem-solving."

— Coyne, Jerry Allen (b. 1949)

Date: October 10, 2016

"Patrick Collison, the C.E.O. of the electronic-payments company Stripe, likened Altman's brain to the claw machine on a carnival midway: 'It roams around but has the ability to plunge very deep when necessary.'"

— Friend, Tad (b. 1962)

Date: November 28, 2016

"'It's like getting new software installed in your head,' Brooker said of being a father, though he rejected the idea that it had mellowed him."

— Harvey, Giles

Date: December 29, 2016

"Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without an enthusiastic report in the popular media about intriguing neuroscience research linking some human behavior to the function of a particular brain circuit."

— Friedman, Richard A.

Date: September 13, 2016

"As long as Trump continues his fear mongering by constantly portraying Muslims and Mexican immigrants as imminent dangers, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch."

— Azarian, Bobby

Date: January 18, 2017

"News that contradicts his worldview gets flushed down the sort of emotional and intellectual dispose-all that I think he carries around with him from the second he gets out of bed to the minute he goes to sleep each night."

— Kruse, Michael

Date: January 17, 2017

"It not only gets the steel ball rolling onto the intestines, but also activates the senses, setting them to the frequencies at which the signals of new dangers can be received. Those signals appear as noise to the previous -- pre-war -- mind, as a breakdown in communication."

— Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)