Quotes About Cognition

Meditation helps people balance and calibrate their left-right brain.

I have a rude thought every three seconds!

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

Ask yourself whether the letter K appears more often as the first or as the third letter of English words. You will probably answer that it appears more often as the first letter. Actually, K appears as the third letter twice as often. Why the error? We find it easier to recall words with a certain letter at the beginning than words with that same letter somewhere else.

You must use your head when figuring out this challenge, and that is the best part.

Real cognitive science, however, is necessarily based on experimental investigation of actual humans or animals. We will leave that for other books, as we assume the reader has only a computer for experimentation.

In the first instant of seeing, of knowing, Catell heard the terrible sounds of everything that breaks, bursts, and rips apart beyond repair, and the mad turning of all that moves, speeds, dashes about for a while, turning like a giant wheel, around, around. Then the wheel stopped.

Our core beliefs simply appear to us as reality.

Prereading is a game changer. It changed my life. Everyone is smarter when they have seen the material before. You will be too

In his critique of reason, Nietzsche accomplished nothing less than the proof that all cognition is local in character and that, in imitating the divine eye, no human observer is able to go as far as really transcending his own location.

We also know, of course, that human beings are not perfectly rational calculators. Our behavior and decisions are based on a mixture of calculation, emotions, and internalized norms, with calculation often a minor component of the cocktail.

Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus disease. Just for starters.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." —Emerson M. Pugh

We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think.

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.

He's smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he's got a fifty-word vocabulary." A soft snort. "It's not like it'd kill him to use an adverb once in a while.

How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?" "I – what?" "An elephant never forgets." He said nothing. "That's an AI joke," she said after a while.

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another.

Don't lecture me in my own field! We've got language and speech centers hardwired into our brains. That gives us a common starting point. Gels don't have anything like that. Speech might just be one giant conditioned reflex to them.

People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half asses way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on try. We focus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back

So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.

no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language.