Quotes About Cognition

Just as a man working with his tools should know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know its limitations.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.

Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless.

No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge," Dr. Waterhouse reminds him.

It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like "complicated.

But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened.

Well, it seems that this process you call consciousness is somewhat more complex than you perhaps gave it credit for at first," Orolo said. "One must be able to take in givens from sparse dustings of probability waves in a vacuum—" "I.e., see stuff." "Yes, and perform the trick of integrating those givens into seemingly persistent objects that can be held in consciousness.

The ability of our consciousness to see—not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things—copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas—and making these things available to cognition—that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought.

Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies.

Clarity of mind (Cm) is affected by any number of factors, but by far the most important is horniness, which might be designated by ?, for obvious anatomical reasons that Waterhouse finds amusing at this stage of his emotional development.

How can you remember shit like that?" Ty asked.

Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time.

They can't tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on in her brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't use when they were asking the nonsense questions.

As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.

Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it—the more viruses you get exposed to—the better your immune system becomes.

The first step is learning to monitor your thoughts; to think about what you are thinking about.

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all. No judgment implied. Just an observation.

Science literacy is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever ran, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that?

Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain.

Dante says:  Knowledge doth come of learning well retained,   Unfruitful else

Recall is an act of disciplined reimagination, and the remote past may be beyond anyone's ken.

In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.