Quotes About Cognition

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

Adam sat back and scoured his recent memory.

MAJOR PREMISE: I can control my thoughts. MINOR PREMISE: My feelings come from my thoughts. CONCLUSION: I can control my feelings.

I had reached a level of sophistication at which I could know I was fooling myself and still fool myself.

I want you to look and think. I want every one to look and think. Half the misery in the world comes first from not looking, and then from not thinking. And I do not want you to be miserable.

The primary focus of psychotherapy involves the integration of feelings (affect) and thinking (cognition), resulting in personal growth.

Thinking is stinking.

Most recently, the task of assembling the genetic story for specific phenotypic traits has begun. It is still in its early stages, but progress is accelerating nonlinearly. Hence the nervousness that has prevented open discussion of what's going on in the geneticists' parallel universe: the fear that we will discover scary population differences in what I have called cognitive repertoires.

Page 39: Among people of the four races with IQs of 100, 70 percent are European or Asian. For IQs of 115, 85 percent. For IQs of 125, 90 percent. For IQs of 140, 96 percent.

We think only in signs.

Signs are of three classes, namely, Icons (or images), Indices, and Symbols. Article 6. An icon is a sign which stands for its object because as a thing perceived it excites an idea naturally allied to the idea that object would excite.

Bad information is a disease that attacks the brain. It messes with your head, making you do things that you shouldn't, causing you to make wrong decisions. Just as a potent virus co-opts your cells' machinery, bad information can co-opt your behavior. It can alter the way you interact with the world and, as a result, it can change the world.

Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you're trying to improve your cognition. Reality doesn't remind you. Why not celebrate stupidities in both categories?

we almost always make the implicit assumption that everybody else thinks and ex-periences about the same way as we do, with the exception of "crazy" people.

And concepts are crucial to cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve, generalize, analogize. Correspondingly, the lack of appropriate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate problems.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

Sometimes I feel bad for the girls because they aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. In fact, they're more like a couple of dull butter knives that were left in the grass outside of the shed.

I think the brain has a special box where it keeps crappy memories. It stays shut, but everytime a new entry has to be added, it opens and you can look at what is inside.

I don't exaggerate - I just remember big

I wonder if there is such a thing in nature as a FAT MIND? I really think I have met with one or two: minds which could not keep up with the slowest trot in conversation; could not jump over a logical fence, to save their lives; always got stuck fast in a narrow argument; and, in short, were fit for nothing but to waddle helplessly through the world.

The toughest battle is Mind.

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.