Quotes About Cognition

William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature.

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

The fact that three-fifths of an octopus' neurons are not in their brain, but in their arms, suggests that each arm has a mind of its own.

Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.

My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.

The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.

There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.

I want to see you use your brain. Get the job done efficiently. I want to see an intelligent operator at work. And apart from that, to stay on my good side, just do as you're told.

The great events of the world take place in the Brain. It is in the Brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain.

I said in Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world take place in the brain: but it is in the brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

have a wonderful instinct about things.  They can discover everything except the obvious.

At the moment the eyes of the body closed, the eyes of the mind were opened.

Scientists tell us that 98 percent of our 60,000 thoughts are repeats from the day before.

Having a normal human brain does not imply that you have religion. All it implies is that you can acquire it, which is very different.

Our inference systems may be there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent in normal human environments for hundred of thousands of years.

The proper place to start, in order to understand the various things called religion, is in the human capacity to entertain supernatural fantasy. This vast domain of cognition includes daydreaming, fiction, myth, dreams, all produced by what classical psychology would have called the faculty of imagination.

It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

People need books like zombies need brains.

The way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.

Your brain is the "greediest" organ in the body; the resting brain uses oxygen and glucose at 10 times the rate of the rest of the body. Thus, even though the brain makes up less than 2.5 percent of total body weight, it is responsible for 20 percent of the body's energy consumption.

People who have lost their memories have lost much of what makes them who they are. Memory is what enables us to learn by experience. In fact, memory is essential to survival.

If I lost all five of my senses, I know I could live on inside my mind. For it is in the mind we see, and in the mind we live, whether we know it or not.

You know something when you are able to deal with it as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.