Date: 2006
"While the amygdala's role as a sentinel and trigger for distress is old news to neuroscience, its social role, as part of the brain's system for emotional contagion, has been revealed only recently."
preview | full record— Goleman, Daniel (b. 1946)
Date: Summer 2009
"It is in this sense that the first-personal perspective is strictly unavoidable: I am not a passenger on a vessel pulled hither and yon by impulses and desires; I have to steer."
preview | full record— Pippin, Robert B. (b. 1948)
Date: 2010
"Yet somehow, while he'd slept, the name had taken up residence in his head, as if he'd gone to sleep listening to a song played over and over, the lyrics digging a rut into his brain like a plow, and now part of his mind was still in that rut and couldn't get out."
preview | full record— Cronin, Justin
Date: December 19, 2010
"But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas."
preview | full record— Krugman, Paul (b. 1953)
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 20, 2013
"As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter."
preview | full record— Paglia, Camille (b. 1947)
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: June 5, 2016
"They [brain and heart] talk like best friends via the common carotid artery, which sends blood from the heart to the brain at a running speed of three feet per second."
preview | full record— Hill, Melissa