Quotes About Cognition

The researchers consistently found that all kinds of mental abilities began to come back online—after as little as four months of aerobic exercise. A different study looked at school-age children. Children jogged for 30 minutes two or three times a week. After 12 weeks, their cognitive performance had improved significantly compared with prejogging levels. When the exercise program was withdrawn, the scores plummeted back to their preexperiment levels.

Every time I lectured to a group of parents-to-be about baby brain development,

People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days. And the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.

Because we don't fully understand how our brains work, we do dumb things. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention.

Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

A lifetime of exercise results in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving skill.

This led to the masterpiece of evolution, the region that distinguishes humans from all other creatures. It is a specialized area of the frontal lobe, just behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex.

One study hints that it could, though more work needs to be done. Kids with normal hearing took an American Sign Language class for nine months, in the first grade, then were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attentional focus, spatial abilities, memory, and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically—by as much as 50 percent—compared with controls who had no formal instruction.

Executive function is a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

We now know that infants do not gain a more sophisticated vocabulary until their fine-motor finger control improves.

Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.

Not to know me argues yourselves unknown.

Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind.

Not just because analogies make arguments, but because they often trigger emotions that override the circuits of reason, and sometimes at a subconscious level.

You're either a liberal or a conservative if you have an IQ above a toaster. Ann Coulter

Memory is too unreliable to be 'truthful'.

The best objects to think with are words, because that is part of what words are for. Indeed, it is a condition for something to be a word that it be thinkable. But

There is, in short, no way for us to picture subjectivity as part of our worldview because, so to speak, the subjectivity in question is the picturing.

She will not notice that her clocks have slowed down, because she will herself be thinking more slowly.

Even thinking was hard.

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.

Language is the light of the mind.