Quotes About Cognition

Intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.

The only thing we'll ever really know are those electrical pulses that are sent up by our senses.

I'm thinking that, collectively, men are only slightly more observant than mollusks.

none can desire what he has not perceiv'd.

Man's desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceiv'd.

Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he percieves more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover

Never was his remarkable memory more useful than when he could see mathematics only in his mind's eye.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less; and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.

I was an estructuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.

Thought was a valuable thing, that got results.

Ralph era uno specialista del pensiero, ora, e poteva riconoscere il pensiero in un altro.

I don't guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.

Guess?" Vizzini cried. "I don't guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.

Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

Psychology is the science of mental life

our moral and practical attitude....impulses, inhibitions.... how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar.... It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287]

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.