Date: 1960

"Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants."

— Quine, W. V. O. (1908-2000)

Date: 1989

"Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization."

— Churchland, Paul (b. 1942)

Date: 2001

"The mind is like those floating islands of vegetation whose roots grasp not the earth but each other."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: December 15, 2015

"I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: July 11 & 18, 2016

"He has Trumpmunity: his notions are so low and have been so many times decried, and yet they keep arriving, in new and escalating varieties, and the liberal imagination wilts."

— Saunders, George (b. 1958)

Date: June 30, 2017

"Besides the occasional memory gaffe, the brain's approach to forgetting serves us well, and our retrieval failures help prune away memories that we don't really need."

— Boser, Ulrich

Date: May 4, 2018

"A few decades before Freud, Nietzsche preached that those of us who are called to search ourselves need to go into the inner labyrinth and hunt down the instincts and passions that blossom into our pet theories and moral judgments."

— Marino, Gordon

Date: Dec. 15, 2018

"They found that the most disrupted genes were those for growth factors, proteins that act like a kind of brain fertilizer"

— Friedman, Richard A.