Quotes About Cognition

The act of thinking is man's primary act of choice.

There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think.

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of "the heart," not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy.

It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain.

It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand.

Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn.

back, to feel the reality of his

In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality.

I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.

It is so easy to invent, by mistake, not remember what was there, what is truly remembered?

As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms.

To think is not always to see.

Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. 

is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

Only what do you know?

know. I get it. Because when I knew but they didn't know I knew, that was good. But when they knew that I knew but I didn't know they knew, that was bad. But now that I know they know that I know, and they don't know it, it's good again.

I know. I get it. Because when I knew but they didn't know I knew, that was good. But when they knew that I knew but I didn't know they knew, that was bad. But now that I know they know that I know, and they don't know it, it's good again.

The availability heuristic says that we assume that the more available some piece of information is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past. This heuristic is partly true. In general, the frequency of experience does affect its availability to memory. But frequency of experience is not the only thing that affects availability to memory. Salience or vividness matters as well.

counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion.

Are we aware of our mind's distortions of our past experiences? In most cases, the answer is no. As time goes by and the memories gradually change, we become convinced that we saw or said or did what we remember.

Animals do not possess this ability. We call it "self-awareness" or the ability to think about your very thought process.

In the words of Abraham Maslow, "He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail." This is another factor that affects the "young lady/old lady" perception difference. Right brain and left brain people tend to look at things in different ways.