Quotes About Cognition

Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification. Amos's

The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see.

Los psicólogos de finales de los años cuarenta habían detectado, o afirmaban haber detectado, que la mente tenía la capacidad para defenderse de lo que en apariencia no quería percibir.

Psychologists have long known that people see patterns where none exist.

Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason.

In making predictions and judgments under uncertainty," they wrote, "people do not appear to follow the calculus of chance or the statistical theory of prediction. Instead, they rely on a limited number of heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead to severe and systematic error.

people had the ability to hold in their short-term memory seven items, more or less.

The central question posed by Gestalt psychologists was the question the behaviorists had elected to ignore: How does the brain create meaning? How does it turn the fragments collected by the senses into a coherent picture of reality?

If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn't shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were "conservative Bayesians.

For some reason human beings did not see it that way. "People's intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well," Danny and Amos wrote.

If our minds can be misled by our false stereotype of something as measurable as randomness, how much might they be misled by other, vaguer stereotypes?

Simply knowing about a bias wasn't sufficient to overcome it:

The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking," wrote Danny and Amos. "There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.

The University of Michigan psychologist Dick Nisbett, after he'd met Amos, designed a one-line intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are.

Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.

you get when you can't think of a word that feels as if it's right on the tip of your tongue. For most people the relief they experience upon finding it is almost physical. They sink back in their

Mental masturbation is actually an important concept. It's when you talk in circles for an hour and reach no decision.

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.

Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don't even realize it is happening

Danny the whole idea of proving that people weren't rational felt a bit like proving that people didn't have fur. Obviously people were not rational, in any meaningful sense of that term.

Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces the stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.

The storage capacity of the average human brain is two-hundred and fifty-six exabytes. However, the average adult human only uses approximately one billionth of that storage space effectively. This means my knowledge capacity is approximately three thousand trillion times that of your average human.

We are not just passive receptors sponging up a flow of images and information. Perception involves organizing stimuli and data into comprehensible units. In a word, perception is itself an act of selective editing.

The very nature of perception makes it a predominantly subjective experience.