Quotes About Cognition

A list of ways in which we're stupid can't explain why we're so smart.

For the expressions to proliferate so easily, speakers and hearers must be dissecting the implied metaphor to lay bare the connexions between the things named by the metaphor and the abstract concepts they are really talking about. (In literary theory these are sometimes called the 'vehicle' and the 'tenor' of the metaphor; cognitive scientists call them the 'source' and the 'target'.)

language often allows us to express that aspect as a noun, whether or not it is a physical object. For example, when we say I have three reasons for leaving, we are counting reasons as if they were objects (though of course we do not literally think that a reason can sit on a table or be kicked across a room).

the mind is a metaphor-monger

people could not analyse their metaphors if they didn't command an underlying medium of thought that is more abstract than the metaphors themselves.

Thinking can not trade in metaphors directly. It must trade in a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic […] while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.

Lakoff is right to insist that conceptual metaphors are not just literary garnishes but aides to reason – they are 'metaphors we live by.' And metaphors can power sophisticated inferences, not just obvious ones…

I'd love a super human memory. My memory has never been good.

To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.

The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains with conversation.

Now, strict logicians regard self-deception as an impossibility. They cannot understand how it is possible for a person to believe one thing and its opposite simultaneously. Logicians are not psychologists,

We process the unknown world from the bottom up. We encounter containers of information, so to speak, whose full import is by no means self-evident.

Pointing is, as well, a crucial precursor to the development of language.

People differ in intelligence, which is in large part the ability to learn and transform.

When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things they shouldn't do. Then they can not do them. Then they don't have to suffer the consequences. That's the purpose of thinking.

That's the dirty little secret of advanced geometry. It may sound impressive that we can do geometry in ten dimensions (or a hundred, or a million...), but the mental pictures we keep in our mind are two-or at most three-dimensional. That's all our brains can handle. Fortunately, this impoverished vision is usually enough.

Algunos investigadores, como Richard Klein, atribuyen dicha revolución cultural a una mutación genética, la cual se habría producido hace unos 50.000 años, que mejoró la capacidad cognitiva en nuestra especie.

Te haré sentir todos los placeres, pero no puedo hacerte pensar.

Theorists are a smart bunch (in theory),

Una vez escuché en un documental dedicado al funcionamiento del cerebro que en ocasiones recordamos para olvidar. Pasamos una y otra vez sobre los surcos del mismo disco para borrarlos. Como si la repetición eliminara la memoria en lugar de preservarla.

La inteligencia humana es la memoria guiada por el entendimiento, el entendimiento hecho posible por la memoria, y la voluntad emergiendo de todo y dirigiéndolo todo.

El espacio inconsciente tiene una capacidad mucho mayor que el consciente, ya que puede contener y manejar muchas variables que potencialmente ayudan a la mejor elección en una pequeña ventana de tiempo.

O homem médio tem "ideias" dentro de si, mas carece da função de idear.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.