Quotes About Cognition

The brain is so wrong, all the time. [...] Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.

Perception is controlled hallucination.

Physical activity engages our brains in ways that mere thought or contemplation does not—indeed, there is reason to believe there is no such thing as "mere thought." All human thought requires embodiment, and without bodies we could not think. We can have a faint idea or hunch in our mind, but it is only when we speak or write it that it becomes clear, not just to others but to ourselves as well.

My memory is good for some things and not others.

What's fun about homonyms is hearig a word in a sentence and suddenly realizing that it has a homonym or maybe two (or three, but that's so rare I don't often think about homonym quartets) and that you haven't thought of that homonym pair or trio before.

An average person has an IQ of 100. An above-average person has an IQ of 120 to 140. A person with an IQ of 150 is considered a genius. Janine's IQ is 196. Sometimes

The freedom from self that is both the goal and the foundation of spiritual life is coincident with normal perception and cognition

is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move.

Nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence for it in the universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The only proof that it is like something to be you at this moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.10

neuroscientists now acknowledge that the human mind tends to wander, engaging in what has been called "stimulus-independent thought.

It isn't enough to know, in the abstract, that thoughts continually arise or that one is thinking at this moment, for such knowledge is itself mediated by thoughts that are arising unrecognized. It is the identification with these thoughts—that is, the failure to recognize them as they spontaneously appear in consciousness—that produces the feeling of "I." One

The human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2.

There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

The true art of memory, is the art of attention

El lenguaje es el arsenal de la mente humana: contiene al mismo tiempo los trofeos de su pasado y las armas de sus futuras conquistas.

You can't unlearn something, even if you want to. You know what you know.

Happy, normal lives going on in happy, normal ways, in a world that was anything but. Once you realized this, experienced something that made it crystal clear, you couldn't forget it. Like a face. Or a name. However you first learn that truth, once it's with you, it never really goes away.

Choose a few different words for different toys — like "toy," "ball," and "bone." Encourage everyone to name the object as they toss it. Soon your puppy will be able to identify up to five different toys.

Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.

I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.

Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

Clinical psychologists have proven that ordinary people will alter their memories of the past to make them fit their perceptions. It is the way all normal brains function under ordinary circumstances.