Quotes About Cognition

There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.

I say now, as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

Yo creo que, normalmente, el cerebro de una persona es como un pequeño ático vacío en el que hay que meter los muebles que uno prefiera.

It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it.

Mr. Holmes always knows whatever there is to know.

You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.

consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.

there is no such thing as an unconscious no.

No one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

no one who still shares a delusion will ever recognize it as such.

What one forgets once he will often forget again.

Thought is action in rehearsal.

el sujeto entraña pensamientos de los que nada sabe; esto es, como una percepción endopsíquica de lo reprimido.

The severest test of the imagination is naming a cat

Years later I would realize that this was one of the world's great problems, that people often allow themselves not to think. They choose not to think, and that's how the whole world gets into trouble.

Dogs know things. They know and know and know.

It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time - that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind.

worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out.

It is not enough to have perceived such a notion, given it one's attention, understood it; it must be given a permanent place in the mind, so that it may be present even when one's attention is directed toward something else.

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .