Date: 1975

"If learning is a generalized process whereby each brain is stamped afresh by experience, the role of natural selection must be solely to keep the tabula rasa of the brain clean and malleable."

— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)

Date: 1975

"Only small parts of the brain resemble a tabula rasa; this is true even for human beings."

— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)

Date: September, 1979

"Indeed, some philosophers have thought of intentional mental events as being inner, physical sentence (or symbol) tokens--a sort of brain writing."

— Burge, Tyler (b. 1946)

Date: November 22, 1990

"The nervous system adapts, is tailored, evolves, so that experience, will, sensibility, moral sense, and all that one would call personality or soul becomes engraved in the nervous system."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Date: 1999

"Working memory has been called the 'chalkboard of the mind.'"

— Siegel, Dan J. (b. 1957)

Date: 2002

"Meaning derives from the linkages among these representations with others spread throughout the cortical system in a vast associational network, similar to a dictionary or a relational database."

— Crick, Francis (1916-2004) and Christof Koch (b. 1956)

Date: 2004

"Nature provides a first draft, which experience revises."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: 2004

Now your Pen shall be as liquid and infinite as your Mind as you complete 'Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets'!"

— Wayne, Teddy

Date: 2007

"It would keep, and my brain filed it away for later."

— Engel, Howard (b. 1931)

Date: 2007

"One's collection comes to symbolize the contents of one's mind."

— Updike, John (1932-2009)