Brandon Rodriguez

“Dreaming may simply be a by-product of this nightly cerebral housecleaning. As the brain clears wastes and consolidates memories, neural circuits fire randomly, briefly throwing up fragmentary images, a bit like someone jumping between television channels when looking for something to watch. Confronted with this incoherent flow of memories, anxieties, fantasies, suppressed emotions, and the like, the brain possibly tries to make a sensible narrative out of it all, or possibly, because it is itself resting, doesn’t try at all, and just lets the incoherent pulses flow past. That may explain why we generally don’t remember dreams much despite their intensity—because they are not actually meaningful or important.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be 'natural': they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.”
― Carlo Rovelli, L'ordine del tempo