Quotes About Cognition

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.

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.

But rationalization has its own sidekick. It's that part of our psyche that actually believes what rationalization tells us. It's one thing to lie to ourselves. It's another thing to believe it.

To have a second language is to have a second soul, said Charlemagne around 800 AD. Each language has its own cognitive toolkit, said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

The job of the conscious is to make the unconscious conscious.

is impossible to specify what [consciousness] is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.

People have an amazing capacity to remember pictures. After being shown 10,000 photographs just once they can correctly recognize almost all of them a week later. This is in marked contrast to the very poor memory for isolated words.

Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see a lot of people doing it.

Have you noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get? While

He's over your head!" He was, but naturally I'd flung myself into the Sea of Voltaire anyway and emerged with nothing more than several aphorisms.

Minds hold more than they know.

We understand what we want to understand.

One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don't believe it's true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.

Why do we remember the bad stuff and not the good?

He knew that there was a world of difference between these two notions: one was sane and the other was not, but he could not for the life of him remember which was which.

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

She gave this some thought. "Oh,

If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

one cognitive symptom of depression may be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place.

now. We should know something

It's distressing when intellect can't detect its own defects.