Quotes About Cognition

Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making.

Every compartment in his brain which he had thought to find so full of wit was bolted fast; he grew positively stupid.

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.

CHANGING MINDS THROUGH REPRESENTATIONAL REDESCRIPTION

By the time the child has reached the age of seven or so, his development has become completely intertwined with the values and goals of the culture. Nearly all learning will take place in one or another cultural context; aids to his thinking will reside in many other human beings as well as in a multitude of cultural artifacts. Far from being restricted to the individual's skull, cognition and intelligence become distributed across the landscape.

But you don't always have to ask to know.

Yet the replacement thesis faces an obvious, glaring problem. As Hilary Kornblith notes, psychology can tell us how we do arrive at our beliefs, but we can still ask, "Are the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs the ones by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs?

A rational man proportions his belief to the evidence," Hume said. The brain study cited by Shermer indicates that we too often do the opposite. We proportion our beliefs to our emotions and process the evidence as our feelings demand

We don't often remember our lives in original chronologies, do we? More in associative patterns

Margaret could not reply. Was he incredibly stupid, or did he understand her better than she understood herself?

The tools of the mind can be wrongly used, but the mind possesses no wrong tools.

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once observed that the simple act of asking yourself, "Where did I put my keys?" performs unexpected magic: it transforms the world into a catalog of possible key locations.1 Under the couch, somewhere the dog or the baby moved

information was like a stone skimming across the surface of his brain, soon sinking, never to be retrieved.

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

Human beings, on the other hand, are symbolic creatures. Inside their heads they break down the outside world into a mass of mental symbols, then recombine those symbols to recreate that world. What they subsequently react to is often the mental construct, rather than the primary experiences themselves.

Otra faceta destructiva de la psicología humana es que, cuando alguien se ha hecho una idea de algo, aceptará la evidencia que refuerce su opinión y rechazará la que la contradiga.

You have not forgotten to remember; You have remembered to forget. But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember - and generally more practical.

Remembering and Forgetting You have not forgotten to remember; You have remembered to forget. But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember – and generally more practical.

The intellect is not sovereign: knowledge is.