Quotes About Cognition

Schiller was also aware that the two functions, thinking and affectivity (feeling-sensation), can take one another's place, which happens, as we saw, when one function is privileged:

We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking.

Okay . . . Joe quickly figured

The best camera is already always with you, because the best, sensor is your brain and the best lens is your eyes.

There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.

In Ericsson's seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual's capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.

What, if anything, is active in the brain when someone is not trying to do a task? "It was an unusual question," notes Lieberman, but we should be glad they asked, because it led to a remarkable discovery: the team found that there's a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you're not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task," and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making.

A now voluminous line of inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible.

more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking

To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you'll struggle to concentrate. (For

Mientras una parte de lo que percibimos penetra a través de nuestros sentidos a partir del objeto que tenemos ante nosotros, otra parte (y tal vez ésta sea la mayor) surge siempre de nuestra propia mente. William James Principios de psicología

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind. William James, The Principles of Psychology

Don't forget that déjà vu is the word that when you look it up the dictionary says, "You've looked this up before, haven't you?

At times I think I can hear my brain screaming, "I am reading here, so please, all other body parts, do your best to keep up!

Books taught me how to think.

Das Schlimme bei passionierten Reitern ist, dachte er, daß die ständige Stimulation der Geschlechtsorgane zwangsläufig die Gehirntätigkeit behindert.

Sensation tell us a thing is. Thinking tell us what it is this thing is. Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.

I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.