Quotes About Cognition

Fear, Katherine had once heard, acted as a stimulant sharpening the mind's ability to think.

La mente humana tiene un primitivo mecanismo de defensa que niega cualquier realidad que provoque un estrés excesivo al cerebro. Se llama negación".

The left brain was analytical and verbal, while the right brain was intuitive and "preferred" pictures to words.

Coke had a theory to explain grown-ups, as he did for most things in life. In his view, babies are born with a specific number of brain cells, which waste away and die off as people get older. So by the time they reach thirty—and certainly by the time they reach forty—most of their brain cells are gone. This explains why grown-ups do and say the things they do.

The birth of the mind is the death of the senses

The birth of the mind is the death of the senses — it's not that we eat an apple and get a little sexy!

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Christopher Bollas, writes: "There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: "There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

Stress makes people stupid." On

The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.

Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the "cognitive unconscious" presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it.7 Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.

In short, out-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid.

Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: "What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.

We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.

In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5

The executive circuits that allow us to think about our own thoughts and to monitor the feelings that flow from them let us apply the same reasoning to other people´s minds when we choose to direct our attention that way

Such self-awareness would seem to require an activated neocortex, particularly the language areas, attuned to identify and name the emotions being aroused. Self-awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is perceived. Rather, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions.

el descontrol emocional obstaculiza la labor del intelecto

La magnitud de las preocupaciones que tiene la gente mientras está haciendo un examen es proporcional a la pobreza de su ejecución,17 porque los recursos mentales invertidos en una determinada tarea cognitiva –la preocupación– reducen los recursos disponibles para procesar otro tipo de información.

largo de un proceso conocido con el nombre de «podado», el cerebro va perdiendo las conexiones neuronales menos frecuentadas y fortaleciendo aquellos circuitos sinápticos más utilizados. De este modo, el «podado», al eliminar las sinapsis menos utilizadas, mejora la relación señal/ruido del cerebro extirpando la causa misma del «ruido».

In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.

The subcortical circuits that know such gut truths before we have words for them include the amygdala and the insula. A scholarly review of gut intuitions concludes that using feelings as information is a "generally sensible judgmental strategy," rather than a perennial source of error, as the hyperrational might argue.1 Tuning in to our feelings as a source of information taps into a vast amount of decision rules that the mind gathers unconsciously.

La mente del lector suele divagar entre el 20 y 40% del tiempo que dedica a la lectura.