Quotes About Cognition

We would be able neither to remember nor to reflect nor to compare nor to think, indeed, we would not even be the person who we were a moment ago, if our concepts were divided among many and were not to be encountered somewhere together in their most exact combination.

If we're going to go farther from Earth, to Mars or somewhere else someday, we have to have a good understanding of the psychological impact on people. And not only psychologically, but how it affects their cognition. We're doing a lot of research on my cognitive abilities.

What I really love about philosophers and psychologists is that they sound smart.

The more fluent the experience of reading a quote - or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind--the less likely we are to question the actual quotation.

Your conscious mind receives information through the five senses of sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. Your conscious mind keeps track of what you need for thinking and operating, and it filters out what you don't need. Your conscious mind (and what your memory retains) is the intelligence with which you normally think, reason, and plan.

every sense impression that you receive through any of the five senses, influences your thoughts.

You are not mentally developed by what you read, but by what you think about what you read.

Your subconscious mind works continuously, while you are awake, and while you sleep.

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).

Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.

it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.

Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be prudent and careful in daily life, forcing us to add an extra layer of protection, but

As an empiricist (actually a skeptical empiricist) I despise the moralizers beyond anything on this planet: I still wonder why they blindly believe in ineffectual methods. Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions. We will see how modern behavioral science shows this to be completely untrue.

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept.

Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do-except, of course, when we think about it.

The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts.

Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical

but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it.