Date: 2007

"Books externalize our brains, and turn our homes into thinking bodies."

— Updike, John (1932-2009)

Date: May 10, 2009

"Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes."

— Suderman, Peter

Date: February 25, 2010

"That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to 'work' with all the information stuck in consciousness."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: 2011

"In contrast, '50 First Dates' utilizes Hawaii as a kind of blank slate, a place emptied of political turmoil and a perfect metaphor for the state of mind produced by the erasure of memory."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: October 31, 2011

"The interpreter [the left-brain narrating system] creates the illusion of a meaningful script, as well as a coherent self."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: April 15, 2012

"If the child's mind was a tabula rasa — a clean slate upon which, as Mao Zedong once put it, 'the most beautiful characters could be written' -- then a person's character and mind-set would not be immutable and God-given, but shaped and honed in the environment."

— Smits, Rick

Date: July 5, 2014

"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: May 19, 2014

"Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again."

— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)

Date: May 19, 2014

"Memory 'works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page,' Loftus said in a recent speech. 'You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.'"

— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)

Date: May 19, 2014

"If misinformation can be incorporated so seamlessly into a person's recollection of an event, what becomes of the original memory? Is it completely overwritten, or merely adjusted somehow, layered with a new trace?"

— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)