Quotes About Cognition

Faith is when you believe something that you know ain't true.

Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

You'd have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it.

Spending time with most automa is like accompanying someone brutally cognitively damaged, but Ehrsul was a friend. "Come save me from the village idiots," she sometimes said to me after downloading updates alongside other automa.

When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.

George A. Miller's "Magical Number 7" has an expansion module, under certain conditions. We can load around 7 coherent "units" into our mental working space, but depending on our learning and expertise, those units may vary in size.

We might think we understand it because it's right there, in black and white, but it has so many zeros that our brains fog up. It's just "lots." When we see how much larger it is than a million, it comes as a surprise.

Rounding early means sharper recall in the end.

As we gain information we are more likely to focus on what we don't know :" Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

A good book is hard to read, on account of how often it makes you stop and think.

Researchers have warned about growing up with digital habits (TV, mobile phones, video games, etc), and the resultant changes in the physiology of the brain.

Although Walter was the first to admit that his own memory wasn't the best—that he forgot people's names all the time even when he'd been introduced more than once—he

Was man sich lange und oft genug denkt, verliert allen Schrecken. Gedanken nutzen sich ab wie Münzen, die von Hand zu Hand gehn, oder wie Vorstellungen, die man sich immer wieder vors innere Auge ruft.

From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole. Christina's World.

In the meantime, the works of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices.

According to Fred Dick, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, all the laboratories that have tried to find a language area have been successful in that they have indeed found dozens, even hundreds, of them.

Today, the questions that remain most controversial in language evolution are the following: Was there one crucial gateway to language through which only humans have passed? Is there anything in the way language is processed by the brain that is unique to language, rather than a more general form of cognition? At what points in the trajectory of language evolution has natural selection come into play? Can any elements of the language suite be clearly identified as spandrels?

As language is learned, it alters how we process information. Just as when we learn to identify a face with a name, it alters how we treat a face-it's not just a face, it's my friend Mike-so learning language results in our automatic labeling of objects, actions, sounds, and even more abstract categories like emotions. This labeling categorizes the item and links it to other instances of the category.

In particular, judging one's own confidence in having seen or heard something—metacognition, or "knowing about knowing" (recall the four-point confidence scale in chapter 2)—is linked to anterior regions of prefrontal cortex.

A lot of perception is a con job.