Quotes About Cognition

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Solving wits and puzzles, in a way, helps to develop wit and ingenuity.

You can look at your dog and see that it's thinking and has strong feelings. And if it does, so do wolves. And if wolves do, so do elephants. People aren't the only beings that think and feel.

Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.

Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They're less intellectual than men.

With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.

The amount of detailed information which an individual has at his command and his theoretical elaborations of the same are mutually dependent; they grow in and through each other.

I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.

Humans are pattern-seeking animals, consciously and subconsciously imposing designs and theories on to past events. We do this in both our private lives and when looking at history.

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write.

I have been amazed by the interest in cognitive behavioral therapy that has developed since 'Feeling Good' was first published in 1980. At that time, very few people had heard of cognitive therapy.

Physiological psychology is, therefore, first of all psychology.

The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.

Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing.

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

For somebody who has injured their brain, every single thing they say and think will be the subject of their own questioning.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.