Quotes About Cognition

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.

synesthete.

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

Fear is the bodily gnosis which reinforces any emotional and cognitive patterns which serve us to hold change at bay.

Need for cognition" is the psychological term for the tendency to engage in and enjoy hard mental slogs. [...] superforecasters score high in need-for-cognition tests.

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.

tip-of-your-nose delusions can fool anyone, even the best and the brightest—perhaps especially the best and the brightest.

Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don't find it, they impose it.

The psychological term for this process is "construal," which refers to the way that each of us understands and explains the world. Once

In order to decide, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide (what to reason about).

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Snap judgments are sometimes essential. As Daniel Kahneman puts it, "System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence."13

Epistemic uncertainty is something you don't know but is, at least in theory, knowable.

People are less rational than they are adept at rationalizing--explaining away discrepancies between their private morality and actions contrary to it.

If you don't get it, you don't get it." ... "If you don't get it, you may yet.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought," and "As a man thinketh, so he is.

told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama's teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we'd read at school, from Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

It has been said that 80% of what people learn is visual.

I'm a visual thinker, not a language-based thinker. My brain is like Google Images.