Quotes About Cognition

The psychologist Robert Zajonc argued that the way we feel about something, rather than coming on the heels of cognition—that is, "before I can like something, I must have some knowledge about it"—actually accompanies and may even precede it.

But we should be wary of people reeling off ornate wine or coffee descriptions: Our ability to correctly identify particular odors in a complex, blended mixture, for example, begins to hit a "ceiling" at three. Beyond that, tests have shown, people become worse than chance at picking out correct aromas. As

Gut feelings help us filter the world, and what is taste, really, but a kind of cognitive mechanism for managing sensory overload? But

Most of what I know I forgot.

Music can affect for good or ill the body as well as the mind.

Richard Try an association such as Let's say the average person uses ten percent of his brain. How much do you use One and a half percent. The rest is filled with malted hops and bong resin.

I paused. It didn't do to let odd thoughts pass by unexamined.... If you wanted to stay sane, then those thoughts had to be examined, checked and classified.

There is another Brain Principle to go with 'First Things First': that of 'Last Things Too'. This states that, all other things being equal, you will recall more easily the 'last' things. Check your own memory banks and see if this principle holds for the following. You will probably recall: ? -The last new person you met ? -The last time you saw the person you love the most ? -The last social event you attended

But there is no cause to concern because we now know, through the work of Dr Mark Rosenweig in Paris, that even if your brain were fed 10 items of data (each item being a simple word or image) every second for 100 years, it would still have used less than one-tenth of its storage capacity.

I feel audiences are not given enough credit for their intelligence.

and what is remembered is so seldom true

The past does not exist -- except in the brain.

Your brain has a difficult time distinguishing between what you see with your eyes and what you visualize in your mind.

There's a difference between remembering and thinking

Sights, smells, temperature changes—all sorts of stuff. We notice it without consciously thinking about it. He says we may not be paying attention, but our brains are recording and processing it all the same, and these… these observations, or whatever you want to call them, make up a pattern. So if you're good with patterns, the way Mr. Benedict says I am, you can sometimes predict things.

Thoughts carry a great deal of freight.

We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.

That was like watching her brain work on the outside of her head," Fatespeaker said to Starflight.

The problem was, he felt it now.

Excessive and persistent levels of fear create changes in brain function that then interfere with decision-making processes.

misinformation

Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.

The experience of labeling your thoughts "thinking" also, over time, becomes much more vivid.