Quotes About Cognition

Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.

forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience

The entropy paper asks us to conceive of the mind as an uncertainty-reducing machine with a few serious bugs in it.

Our brains constitute only 2.5 percent of our weight yet consumer 20 percent of our energy when we're resting.

Weed" is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception.

We simply don't have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words.

binocular depth inversion illusion.

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner.

neuroscience might have at last found the address for the "But enough about you" center of the brain.

I'd say that we dream primarily the same way that we have consciousness of the world for the same reason. Basically, that our brains evolve to simulate reality and to control what's happening around us.

Since we all have different cognitive profiles, educators should take those individual differences very seriously.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

We perceive through our senses a person, a situation or an event, and in an instant, we project our mental models - our fears, background and experiences - onto that perception. This often results in cognitive errors, which means we judge and respond incorrectly.

When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements.

A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That's a super-interesting problem from an engineering perspective.

I think if a person plays 'Quantum Conundrum' and they walk away feeling really intelligent and skilled, that's what I want. That's my only goal.

Information defines your personality, your memories, your skills.

I like languages. I like working on different accents. I speak English, French and Spanish. I'd love to learn more but I think, as you get older, your brain is a bit slower.

Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.

A person's got to think, otherwise that person's no better than a trained seal balancing a ball on his nose.

sidewalk, she realized that something

Figuring out the long word before her name took a while, and

Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn't a moment to waste.