Quotes About Cognition

That's one of Patrick's favorite theories. He read somewhere that people remember stuff better if they read or think about it right before they fall asleep.

Just assume the human brain has unlimited capacity for memory and processing.

There is a tendency for humans to consciously see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individual's personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being perceived.

They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.

They don't know who the prime minister is; they don't know what day of the week, month or even year it is. They can't quite remember their daughters' names and they certainly can't remember if they had lunch today or what the plan is for supper tonight.

The smarter you are, the more reasons you have to be miserable.

There are a variety of techniques to help people change the kind of thinking that leads them to become depressed. These techniques are called cognitive behavioral therapy.

The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.

Even under normal conditions, how we can distinguish various events, various experiences, and be able to reproduce it later is, of course, a very interesting question and, I think, one that we face in day to day life.

Through using our memory to its fullest we can unlock the vast reservoir of human potential that isn't currently being used.

I don't forget nothing. It's a vault up here.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Lies can be verbal or nonverbal, kindhearted or self-serving, devious or bald-faced; they can be lies of omission or lies of commission; they can be lies that undermine national security or lies that make a child feel better. And each type might involve a unique neural pathway.

I'm a versatile player, can play in numerous positions, and I have a good football brain, even if it is getting older.

I stop suddenly: there is a flaw, I have seen a word pierce through the web of sensations. I suppose that this word will soon take the place of several images I love.

there is no such thing as a rational person. We are emotional creatures with some token capacity for reason.

Concepts need their physical sounds, their scripted marks, etc. Even if we can imagine words "inside our head", we are conjuring their signifiers, their sensory aspects.

Discovery Number One: The Neocortex Learns a Predictive Model of the World

This discovery led to an important question. How does the brain make predictions? One potential answer is that the brain has two types of neurons: neurons that fire when the brain is actually seeing something, and neurons that fire when the brain is predicting it will see something. To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. Using two sets of neurons does this nicely. However, there are two problems with this idea.

Your brain has made a model of the world and is constantly checking that model against reality.

Our reality is similar to the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis; we live in a simulated world, but it is not in a computer—it is in our head.

Mountcastle proposed that the reason the regions look similar is that they are all doing the same thing. What makes them different is not their intrinsic function but what they are connected to.

Cartesian theatre (Dan Dennett's term)