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: September 12, 2016

"'I thought I had completely fried my motherboard,' he continued. 'I remember saying, ''I will never do this again.''"

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: September 12, 2016

"'Indigenous prophesies point to an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean,' Daniel Pinchbeck wrote in his exploration of ayahuasca, technology, and Mayan millennialism, '2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.'"

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

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: 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: 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)

Date: February 18, 2017

"So we're stuck in Trump's head with him. ... It's a very cluttered place to be, a fine-tuned machine spewing a torrent of chaos, cruelty, confusion, farce and transfixing craziness."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)