Quotes About Cognition

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

cognitive triad

It is change that contains vital information, not steady states. Human beings, however, take adaptation to cognitive extremes. We don't just habituate, we recalibrate. We create for ourselves a world of targets, and each time we hit one we replace it with another.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

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.

human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality

Schools don't teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.

first principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

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.

The difference between a mind asking "Must I believe it?" versus "Can I believe it?" is so profound that it even influences visual perception. Subjects who thought that they'd get something good if a computer flashed up a letter rather than a number were more likely to see the ambiguous figure as the letter B, rather than as the number 13.

tried not to think about it, the more he actually thought about it. And the more he actually thought

Your language indicates??and limits??what you think.

A solid group of 100 or so [cognitive] biases has been repeatedly shown to exist,

That is why intelligence is no defense against false belief.

I rather think he knew anyway.

Woman, man, mole, maggot – they're all the same, when all's said and done, except for slight variations in cognitive ability.

My mind works on several levels at once.1

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. Nineteen Eighty-Four             MYAUNGMYA

Yo, por ejemplo, anticipo mucho y recuerdo poco.

The blood around men's heart is their thinking.

Some men go through a forest and see no firewood.

Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.

la inteligencia es una forma de evaluar la realidad que, según el dominio de un tipo de inteligencia o de otro, dará diferentes resultados.