Quotes About Cognition

If your mind is anything like mine, it can stumble through a half-dozen different thoughts in a heartbeat.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

People expect me to be stupid. I'm not saying I'm Stephen Fry, but it is amazing the perception people have.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

I'm not a stupid man.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.

I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things.

Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

Reading is your first line of defense against an empty head.

Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don't appreciate

Today, if you are not confused, you are just not thinking clearly.

Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).

In general, for many scholars writing today, what is problematic about consciousness is its "phenomenal quality" or the fact that "there is something it is like" to be conscious (Nagel, 1974). Piaget does not address this issue head-on but rather through addressing the more important problem of how subjects develop a meaningful understanding of themselves and the world.

For Piaget, psychological life begins with the use of hereditary reflexes (OI, pp. 39, 223). Reflexes are general action patterns such as sucking, looking, and touching (Piaget, 1975/1985, p. 69). Each reflex constitutes an "organized totality" (OI, p. 38) that comprises perceptions, coordinated movements, and a need; it is not just a "summation of movements" (OI, p. 38).

To my way of thinking, knowing an object does not mean copying it – it means acting upon it" (Piaget, 1970, p. 15; cf. Piaget & Inhelder, 1966/1971, pp. 385–386).

Piaget also did not provide a detailed analysis of how communicative interaction leads to symbolic representation.

In contrast to empiricist theories, in which knowledge is derived from perception, Piaget emphasized the role of action and operations (transformation) in the construction of knowledge.

The reflexes of interest to Piaget are distinguished from simple reflexes (e.g., sneezing reflex) in that they change as a result of experience and thus have a history (OI, p. 40).

First, higher mental functions are grounded in and emerge out of a practical, prereflective form of intelligence.

for example, in grasping a new toy, this toy is assimilated to the grasping scheme, the toy attains the functional meaning of being "graspable.