Quotes About Cognition

As a biologist, Piaget considered cognitive development to be part of a much more general tendency of living systems to grow, change, improve and maintain themselves.

According to Piaget, the central idea of empiricism is that "the function of cognitive mechanisms is to submit to reality, copying its features as closely as possible, so that they may produce a reproduction which differs as little as possible from external reality" (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969/1976, p. 24).

Piaget, J. (2001). Studies in reflecting abstraction. Hove: Psychology Press. (Original work published in 1977)

Piaget, J., & Garcia, R. (1989). Psychogenesis and the history of science. New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published in 1983)

Because psychologists generally take knowledge as unproblematic, the complexity of Piagetian theory seems simply superfluous.

Needs themselves are not static but become more complex with the differentiation and integration of sensorimotor schemes (OI, p. 170).

According to Piaget, infants' reactions to the bottle or other stimuli cannot be explained by external stimulus-response relations because the stimuli have a meaning for the infants to begin with; without this meaning, it would not be possible to explain why these stimuli become relevant or how the associations could be confirmed or strengthened (OI, p. 127).

Thinking is only a process of talking to yourself.

Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film.

Intelligence consists in recognizing opportunity

What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk?

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? Can we think in a sophisticated manner without silent internal speech? And lastly, how did this extraordinarily complex, multicomponent system originally come into existence in our hominin ancestors?

The human tendency toward confirmatory thinking - all of us are bias to seek information that fits what we already believe.

Are you thinking about what you're thinking about?

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

But he did not think....thoughts formed in him and dissolved without control, almost like a reverie. And since he had got through life in that fashion, he did not know that it is possible to think better, more accurately, more clearly.

You can only possess beauty through understanding it.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

You'll go out of business if you think people are stupid.