Quotes About Cognition

It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.

Because I do not know the names of things, I do not express them.

we form many incorrect beliefs because we have natural tendencies to evaluate evidence in a biased and faulty manner.

Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the moments thereof are kept and preserved.

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.

Chapter 7 takes a psychological truism, "we tend to believe what we think others believe" and turns it around: We tend to think others believe what we believe. This chapter examines a set of cognitive, social, and motivational processes that prompt us to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, further bolstering our credulity.

As dysfunctional as they may be on occasion, our theories, preconceptions, and "biases" are what make us smart.

We may be particularly inclined to acquire and retain beliefs that make us feel good.

confirmatory events are in fact much more memorable than non-confirmatory events.

People are less aware, however, of another source of divergent beliefs—the fact that the same issue or situation is construed quite differently by different people, even people with the same tastes, values, and orientations. As social psychologist Solomon Asch noted many years ago, differences of opinion between people are not always linked to differences in their "judgment of the object," but often reflect differences in the very "object of judgment" itself.

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

Women, Thumps decided years ago, had a need to know what people around them were doing every minute of the day. It wasn't curiosity exactly, and it wasn't control. It was more as though they were keeping track of the world so that if anyone hit them with a pop quiz, they'd have the right answer.

Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?" Zapffe's answer: "Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

Thinking isn't something you do. Most of the time, it's something that happens to you.

The main function of consciousness is to maximize flexibility and context sensitivity.

Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves.

Have you summoned your wits from woolgathering?

The mind uses considerable creativity in constructing a reality for us that makes sense.

Every man feels that he must believe what he distinctly remembers, though he can give no other reason of his belief, but that he remembers the thing distinctly.

The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.

We all know more than we know we know.