Quotes About Cognition

In fact, less than one percent of all the information the mind takes in actually reaches our awareness. Likewise, most of how we react to that information remains outside our awareness;

we are consciously aware of only a tiny portion of our perceptions and actions. To us, that small compartment appears to fill our whole mental cabinet.

But when emotions enter the picture, our mind's selective attention can be less useful: we can avoid noticing something not because it's irrelevant but because it might disturb us.

Automatic thoughts are the slippery initial defining thoughts of a schema, the ones that prime the flood of feelings and lead to a schema attack.

When we examine the thoughts that empower a schema—like looking at a lab specimen under a microscope—their irrationality becomes fairly obvious.

often suggest that my clients use an inner dialogue with their schemas, talking back to the thoughts rather than remaining passive.

When the amygdala heats up with intense activity, emotionally loaded thoughts loom larger in our field of attention.

The second way mindfulness disempowers schema thoughts has to do with the nature of attention itself.

It is not things themselves that trouble us," wrote Epictetus, a first-century Greek philosopher, "but our thoughts about those things.

Challenge those thoughts. Remind yourself that they distort the way things really are.

Emotions add the qualities of pleasantness or unpleasantness to what the mind perceives.

To some extent, raw emotions arise from a part of the brain without words.

But how you feel love and how you understand love are two different things

Experience is algorithmically incompressible.

It is not that the turret clocks are running faster. What is happening is that our brains are running slower.

For me, thinking typically meant speaking in an internal voice; as we say in the trade, my thoughts were phonologically coded.

I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range.

Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person's mouth hadn't changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn't known it until now.

I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I'm a bit of a muddle.

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.