Quotes About Cognition

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.

all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

The brain highlights what it imagines as patterns; it disregards contradictory information. Human nature yearns to see order and hierarchy in the world. It will invent it where it cannot find it.

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

We need to discern what it is that requires reflection in our lives and in what we read and how we read it.

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

Regardless of the magnitude of the decision, our brains make it hard for us to keep the perspective we need to make good choices.

I don't have perfect pitch, but I have relative pitch. I'm glad I don't have perfect pitch because perfect pitch can drive you crazy.

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.

Safety is something that happens between your ears, not something you hold in your hands.

My best asset is my brain. Without my brain, I don't think the rest of me would be too hot.

I don't know how this guy knew how much money I was making. I didn't know how much money I was making.

Thinking clearly and effectively is the greatest asset of any human being.

The human brain is really bad at thinking about exponential things.

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

You cannot stop the human mind from working.

I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.

I would not be surprised if elephants are more intelligent than human beings. After all, their heads are larger than ours, and the fact that they do not speak might well be an indication of superiority.

It is my task always to know, particularly when I don't.

There are small bits of useless knowledge which stick to one's brain like barnacles to a boat.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

There are small bits of useless knowledge which stick to one's brain like barnacles to