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, ...
preview | full record— Bilger, Burkhard
Date: October 31, 2011
"In short, the brain sustains a sense of unity not just in the presence of its left and right co-pilots."
preview | full record— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)
Date: October 31, 2011
"The interpreter [the left-brain narrating system] creates the illusion of a meaningful script, as well as a coherent self."
preview | full record— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)
Date: May 7, 2012
"When I'm balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in."
preview | full record— Kreider, Tim (b. 1967)
Date: April 23, 2013
"Maybe I’ve been in school too long; doctoral study has a way of turning your head into a never-ending seminar, and I’m now capable of having complicated, inconclusive thoughts about nearly any subject."
preview | full record— Rothman, Joshua
Date: August, 22, 2015
"Some philosophers claim that we know nothing of the external world outside our minds--nothing compared to what sways in our minds, in the long, twisting corridors of memory, the vast mental rooms with half-open doors, the ghosts chattering beneath the chandeliers of imagination."
preview | full record— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)
Date: September 23, 2015
"Carson's ideas about the Big Bang are quite similar to his beliefs about Islam, in that he picked up a snippet of information somewhere -- there's a passage in the Koran that says this or that, there's a thing called entropy -- and that snippet seemed to take hold of his rational faculties and b...
preview | full record— Waldman, Paul
Date: July 16, 2016
"The emotions of the heroine, Riley, [in the film 'Inside Out'] are cartoon characters, and a fantastic 'Jetsons'-esque city inside her mind is a metaphor of the human psyche."
preview | full record— Gabriel, Trip (b. 1955)