Quotes About Cognition

Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia's findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism's needs.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don't have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.

food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5

what else is cognition but information processing? Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Their earlier poor performance had had more to do with the way they were tested than with their mental powers. Elephants

Animals learn what they need to learn and have specialized ways of sifting through the massive information around them. They actively seek, collect, and store information. (p. 270)

A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.

There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival. (p. 200)

He prefers to point with a stick and will go out of his way to bring one with him, thus anticipating our test and his self-invented need for a tool. But

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin

Considering how much animals act like us, share our physiological reactions, have the same facial expressions, and possess the same sort of brains wouldn't it be strange indeed if their internal experiences were radically different?

What is the largest land mammal doing with three times as many neurons as our own species?

In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

Ironically, the study of animal cognition not only raises the esteem in which we hold other species, but also teaches us not to overestimate our own mental complexity. We

humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.

This is clearly not so. Pigeons, for example, do better than humans at mentally rotating visual images, and some birds have an amazing memory for the location of hidden objects. Clark's nutcrackers store up to 33,000 seeds in caches distributed over many square kilometers and find most of the caches again months later.28As someone who occasionally forgets where he has parked an item as large and significant as his car, I am impressed by these peanut-brained birds.

The majority con- sensus, however, reached eventually was again expressed clearly and forcefully by al-Ghazzâlî: "The knowledge about (ma- rifah) God is the end of every cognition (ma- rifah) and the fruit of every knowledge (or science, - ilm) according to all schools of thought." There is no true knowledge of God for man, but human knowledge can achieve some realization of His being.

no le parece que tiene uno suficientes quebraderos de cabeza con lo que piensa de verdad para preocuparse encima de lo que habría podido pensar si lo hubiera pensado?

Proverbs are the literature of reason.

What was once thought can never be unthought.

Reading functions as hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines.

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.