Quotes About Cognition

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions," Helen Keller pointed out. "Conclusions are not always pleasant.

In Cosmides and Tooby's words, "Our modern skulls house a stone age mind."20 They continue: "In many cases, our brains are better at solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on the African savannahs than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we face in a college classroom or a modern city.

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: "Smell is the sense of the imagination.

He understands muslin

animals have minds capable of solving problems, as well as emotions and very definite personalities

You cannot share your life with a dog or a cat and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

What exactly do you mean by the human intellect?

Chimpanzees and the other great apes can learn four hundred or more words of American Sign

But she could only remember that it was good, not how it felt.

eidetic memory. What else any of it meant to

He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.

I don't think his elevator went all the way to the top anymore, if you know what I mean

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

Much of our brainpower goes unused, and many people could benefit greatly from optimizing their mental assets.

Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of much of our behavior, we really aren't very different from other animals.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

Thinking is hard work; that's why so few do it.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

Thinking is hard work, which is why so few people do it.

I don't want riders who work physically hard. Work by thinking.