Quotes About Cognition

If people are mentally agile enough to interpret events in many ways, what's to prevent a child from interpreting the meaning of to nail as "to obscure a surface by nailing things to it," or to coil as "to cause a long object to have a filament coiled around it"?

Moving" and "changing" are not enough grounds for the mind to construe an event in a particular way. It also cares about finer-grained concepts like forcing versus enabling a force, causing versus letting, and before-and-after versus at-the-same-time.

Relativists have a point when they say that we don't just open our eyes and apprehend reality, as if perception were a window through which the soul gazes at the world. The idea that we just see things as they are is called naïve realism, and it was refuted by skeptical philosophers thousands of years ago with the help of a simple phenomenon: visual illusions.

As Richard Lederer points out in Crazy English, we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway, there is no ham in hamburger or bread in sweetbreads, and blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran. But think about the "sane" alternative of depicting a concept so that receivers can apprehend the meaning in the form.

We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.85

A lot follows from the idea that the mind is a metaphor-monger.

Third, children do pick up the pattern.

Intuitive probability is driven by imaginability: the easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems. This entraps us into what Tversky and Kahneman call the conjunction fallacy, in which a conjunction is more intuitively probable than either of its elements.

This one broaches the topic in still another way: what we can learn about our makeup from the way people put their thoughts and feelings in words.

Language is a window into human nature, exposing deep and universal features of our thoughts and feelings.

you have to acknowledge the possibility that generative metaphors are a major phenomenon in language and an important clue to our cognitive makeup. Abstract ideas are connected in a systematic way to more concrete experiences.

The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.

the problem of meaning, like many mysteries in philosophy, may always be shrouded in enigma, because it pushes our common sense into conceptual realms that it did not evolve to think in.

Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?

The Devil's Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.

An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

The inability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names.

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Dopeler effect n. The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Once again, it's good cognitive psychology: 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.

Where they differ is in the construal of those facts: how the intricate swirl of matter in space ought to be conceptualized by human minds.

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.

Without a substrate of thoughts to underlie our words, we do not truly speak but only babble, blabber, blather, chatter, gibber, jabber, natter, patter, prattle, rattle, yammer, or yadda, yadda—an onomatopoeic lexicon for empty speech that makes plain the expectation that the sounds coming out of our mouths are ordinarily about something.

Even the humdrum rationality of seeing rather than hallucinating is in the service of the ever-present goal built into our visual systems of knowing our surroundings.