Quotes About Cognition

In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.

The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical.

A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think. ... Unless we know our cognitive unconscious fully and intimately, we can neither know ourselves nor truly understand the basis of our moral judgments, our conscious deliberations, and our philosophy.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious. Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative. Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

Progressives are suffering from massive hypocognition.

To be accepted, the truth must fit people's frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off. Why?

Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise facts go in and then they go right back out.

even when you negate a frame, you activate the frame.

This is how reason really works: through framing, metaphors, emotion, narratives, and imagery.

Slogans can't overcome hypocognition. Only sustained public discussion has a chance. And that takes knowledge of the problem and a large-scale serious commitment to work for a change.

You might think that the world exists independently of how we understand it. You would be mistaken. Our understanding of the world is part of the world—a physical part of the world. Our conceptual framings exist in physical neural circuitry in our brains, largely below the level of conscious awareness, and they define and limit how we understand the world, and so they affect our actions in the world.

Effective reframing is the changing of millions of brains to be prepared to recognize a reality.

It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world.

Biconceptualism is central to our politics, and it is vital to understand how it works.

about 98 percent of what our brains are doing is below the level of consciousness. As a result, we may not know all, or even most, of what in our brains determines our deepest moral, social, and political beliefs. And yet we act on the basis of those largely unconscious beliefs.

In cognitive science there is a name for this phenomenon. It's called hypocognition—the lack of the ideas you need, the lack of a relatively simple fixed frame that can be evoked by a word or two.

The fundamental frames through which you understand the world are physical.

You can only make sense of what your brain allows.

Because of the effect of language and imagery on the brain, the constant use of one ideology's language over the other's has an enormous effect on our politics.

Neuroscientists have discovered a brain overlap, too, between imagining and doing. Many of the same neural regions are activated when we form mental images as when we actually see.

Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.

The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech.

When you engage your brain, it just keeps getting fatter and richer and wonderful.