Quotes About Cognition

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.

Love is the only emotion that expands intelligence

We now know that human intelligence a million years ago was equal to what it is today.

Perhaps Margery detected some of these mental gymnastics,

I had passed this house a million times in my life without ever actually properly seeing it.

If we're given a number of circumstances to deal with, the brain goes into this mode of trying to find a solution, and it's amazing how good we are at it.

Your brain is doing some great work when it's laughing.

What we know about fishes is only a tiny slice of what they know.

I've often heard it said that everything new starts with a thought.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.

As Epley and Dunning had found, people really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.

In Lerner's experiments, the desperate need to make sense of events can lead people to inaccurate conclusions (for example, a woman "led on" a rapist);

Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

This is the essence of psychological rationalism: We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies. If the caterpillar eats enough leaves, it will (eventually) grow wings. And if the child gets enough experiences of turn taking, sharing, and playground justice, it will (eventually) become a moral creature, able to use its rational capacities to solve ever harder problems. Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

To summarize the idea that our emotions, our reactions to events, and some mental illnesses are caused by the mental filters through which we look at the world, I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion does most of the work.

One use of language is that it partially freed humans from "stimulus control.

each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons.

we see faces in the clouds, but never clouds in faces, because we have special cognitive modules for face detection.

Damasio's patients made terrible decisions because they were deprived of emotional input into their decision making.