Quotes About Cognition

Remember that the human brain is a very delicate organism, and it can be easily damaged.

They are just thoughts, like anyone has thoughts, that's all.

If learning were purely or even predominantly cognitive, then computers would be adequate and there would be no point in gathering people together in a room. But affects are social, "are there first, before we are" (65). The affective environment influences the nature of cognition: "affects may, at least in some instances, find thoughts that suit them, not the other way around" (7).

Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again.

Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

general intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal: the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.

if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.

A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.

Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.

How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn't seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes.

Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.

allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.

Your unconscious, in the sense, was acting as a kind of mental valet. It was taking care of all the minor mental details in your life. It was keeping tabs on everything going on around you and making sure you were acting appropriately, while leaving you free to concentrate on the main problem at hand.

Numerous studies of human cognition have come to parallel conclusions: the human brain can divide random stimuli into about six or seven different categories. For example, the average person can distinguish between about six different musical notes before getting confused.

What Wolf began to realize was that

correct answer is A. I have to confess I couldn't figure this one out, and I'm guessing most of you couldn't either. Chris Langan almost certainly could, however. When we say that people like Langan are really brilliant, what we mean is that they have the kind of mind that can

Tversky Intelligence Test": The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were.

When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time.

The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition.

Thin-slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns ins situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

second lesson of Blink. Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn't seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes.