Quotes About Cognition

Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine.

Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.

there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.

By making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots.

Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?

We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high.

the "Truth-Default Theory," or TDT.

The point of Levine's research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You'd think we'd be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn't.

On average the people watching the videos correctly identified the lairs 56% of the time. Other sociologist have tried similar versions of the same experiment, the average for all of them? 54%. Just about everyone is terrible, police officers, judges, therapists even CIA officers running big spy networks. Everyone. Why? Tim Levine answer is called Truth-default theory.

This kind of management system clearly has its risks. It meant Van Riper didn't always have a clear idea of what his troops were up to. It meant he had to place a lot of trust in his subordinates. It was, by his own admission, a messy way to make decisions. But it had one overwhelming advantage: 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.

The SECRET to unravelling Life's MYSTERIES is thinking.

There's no logical connection between being smart and having money.

The most time consuming process in the world is probably "thinking".

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.

Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.

I have remembered, I suppose, what I wanted to remember; many ridiculous things for no reason that makes sense. That is the way we human creatures are made.

I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

Sólo recuerdas lo que quieres recordar. Sólo sabes lo que tu corazón te permite saber.

On se penetre non par les sensations mais par la pensée, I wonder.

The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

Tip 2 Think! About Your Work

The brain is so wrong, all the time she says, turning to the dark landscape again. Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.