Quotes About Cognition

If a proper education has to include an understanding of thinking, it also has to include an understanding of feelings.

Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.

The only thing you have for measuring what's real is your mind . . . so what happens when your mind becomes a pathological liar?

But we can't choose what we forget. The more we try to forget something, the more we end up remembering it.

She closed her eyes again, and tried to reboot. Human brains, she knew, could be like computers, especially in the time that hung between sleep and wakefulness. Sometimes you said strange things, did even stranger things, and once in a while you couldn't figure out exactly how you got where you got.

His one-eight feels a whole lot bigger when I spend time hanging around in his grey matter.

Sadness is caused by intelligence. The more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn't understand them.

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

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)

Brains mouses over one of the images.

Language does control how you think, and if you don't have a word for it, you won't think of it.

The internet. Everything one needs at one's fingertips. There have been no doubt studies demonstrating how this has affected people's memories in the negative. I will have to look those up online.

Obierika was a man who thought about things.

scopaesthesia. The idea was you could sense when you were being watched. It was a cousin of scopophobia: the fear of being watched.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

Most car advertising assumes that people have IQs that are missing a digit.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

When you walk into a room, you assess it instantaneously, habitually, before you're even aware of it. I mean, you make sure there's not a hole you're going to fall into, but mostly you're not even aware of what you're thinking.

All conviction - and so, necessarily, conversion - is based on the motor and emotional aspects of the mind.

Neuroscientific studies suggest that the brain responds in much the same anxious way to facts that threaten our preconceptions as it does to wild animals that threaten our lives.

Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It's not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it's a habit that does little harm and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can't make them vanish, nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.

Psychologists call this "motivated reasoning." Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice.11