Quotes About Cognition

neuroanatomist

The female memory defies explanation.

we are just now beginning to take stock of how GPS can affect the cognitive map. We may be witnessing the mass narrowing of the human cognitive map—as a construct (a decrease in navigational ability), but possibly also on a more literal level, an actual reordering of our neurons.

Most people weren't wired to see miracles, even when one was staring them in the face.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

There was a thin chain to thinking, he realized, which began with seeing something noticeable, which in time made you see something that wasn't apparent, which finally made you see something that wasn't even visible—if you were doing it right.

Ever since viewing screens entered the home, many observers have worried that they put our brains into a stupor. An early strain of research claimed that when we watch television, our brains mostly exhibit slow alpha waves - indicating a low level of arousal, similar to when we are daydreaming.

In a long story like 'Weathercraft,' it becomes kind of convoluted. It can become perhaps difficult to remember what led up to whatever point you're at. I worried a little bit about people being able to keep the shape of the story in their heads while they were reading it, and not wonder how they got wherever they were.

Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn't notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates.

The worse you are at thinking, the better you are at drinking.

In other words, the better they did on the IQ test, the worse they did on the practical test and the better they did on the practical tests, the worse they did on the IQ test.

I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I'm reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it's worth the effort.

I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

When you look at the brain regions associated with picking up data from the body, a huge amount of the brain is devoted to picking up information from the lips and tongue.

Things that are so hard for people, like playing championship-level Go and poker, have turned out to be relatively easy for the machines. Yet at the same time, the things that are easiest for a person - like making sense of what they see in front of them, speaking in their mother tongue - the machines really struggle with.

Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.

I think we're all very curious about our own minds, but we just may not have the tools to channel that.

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

A gloss is a total system of perception and language.

Scientology is the study of knowingness. It increases one's knowingness, but if a man were totally aware of what was going on around him, he would find it relatively simple to handle any outnesses in that.

A dog doesn't understand mathematics, but that doesn't mean mathematics doesn't exist.