Quotes About Cognition

I possess a strong sense of reason.

People talk about the brain weakening as it ages. Mine feels stronger.

When looking at the brain, it is important to go beyond its structure to its function. This is because often in cognitive disorders, the structure of the brain is intact, but its function is compromised.

We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?

Everything was sensory and I never saw the structure in anything.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

Have you ever noticed that when you must struggle to hear something, you close your eyes?

This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it.

When you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia, you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

I was always good at math, but I was good at everything. It sounds obnoxious, but I was just smart. In school, it's kind of obvious when you're learning things faster than other kids.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.

That we can comprehend the little we know already is mindboggling in itself.

We only had one thing going for us: organic brains.

Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.

How you feel about something, she said, is there before you detect the stimulus;

Art experts are said to have a "good eye." What they really have is a good brain. It is less that they spot things that others do not; it is that they know where to look;