Quotes About Cognition

Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general principles.

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

I felt a tightness on the skin. A visceral type of cognition that I had experienced before. But this was stronger, more immediate: the certainty of something out there, just beyond the threshold of consciousness. It was the experience of haragei.

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

In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.

Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.

Thought is the measure of life.

Life is the power to perceive. Without perception there is no life, and what is most endemic to perception is power.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.

It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

We can only understand what we can name.

The term attention deficit disorder completely misses this point. It is not a deficit of attention that we ADD-ers have, it is that our attention likes to go where it wants to and we can't always control it.

In a neurotypical brain, when the TPN is turned on and you're on task, the DMN is turned off. But in the ADHD brain, the fMRI shows that when the TPN is turned on, the DMN is turned on as well, trying to muscle its way in and pull you into its grasp, thereby distracting you. In ADHD, therefore, the DMN competes with the TPN, which in most people it does not do.

In other words, just as the cerebellum had long been known to act as a kind of gyroscope or balancer of gait and movement, he explained, "so does it regulate the speed, capacity, consistency, and appropriateness of cognition and emotional processes.

Education builds software for your brain.

Learning to play a musical instrument even alters the structure of the brain, from subcortical circuits that encode sound patterns to neural fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres and patterns of gray matter density in certain regions of the cerebral cortex.

The integrative powers of the brain for the sensations that come from handling objects spills out into all other domains of intelligence.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven, are, in a sense, one and the same.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

Let alone, without the help of or hot cognition, cold cognition is simply paralyzed by choice.

Given that the pre-frontal cortex is a key to our success as a species, consuming any amount of alcohol or other intoxicant seems really stupid.

My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively