Quotes About Cognition

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images

Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

Syntax is complex, but the complexity is there for a reason. For our thoughts are surely even more complex, and we are limited by a mouth that can pronounce a single word at a time.

And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us. Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.

The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.

Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him what jazz is: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don't like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later. Topic-then-comment and given-then-new orderings are major contributors to coherence, the feeling that one sentence flows into the next rather than jerking the reader around.

the [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind.

the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is.

When we know something well, we don't realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.

cognitive habits of overattributing design and agency to natural phenomena

concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as "A herring is a mammal"), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one.

I believe that journalists have not given enough thought to the way that media coverage can activate our cognitive biases and distort our understanding.

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.1 No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.

The nature of news is likely to distort people's view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.11

And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us.

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?

a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.

How, then, can we understand this thing called rationality which would appear to be our birthright yet is so frequently and flagrantly flouted?

So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened