Quotes About Cognition

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

This may sound strange, but at a very early age, at around 3, I was aware that I was smarter than the other kids.

You are a victim of your own neural architecture which doesn't permit you to imagine anything outside of three dimensions. Even two dimensions. People know they can't visualise four or five dimensions, but they think they can close their eyes and see two dimensions. But they can't.

I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

I've been playing hand-held video games since 1995. Its my way of training my brain.

My brother and I have always had this theory that, as stupid as it sounds, in video games, there is a certain hand-eye coordination and a thought process that you can learn.

Scientists have shown that pigs are capable of playing simple video games, learning from each other, and even learning names.

Videogames make you feel like you're actually doing something. Your brain processes the tiered game achievements as real-life achievements. Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your brain in a lathery foam, and it seems like you're actually accomplishing stuff.

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

We have a very narrow view of what is going on.

Some people wouldn't recognize the truth if it bit 'em and had 'em for breakfast.

memory is made up of one part perception, one part intuition, and one part pure invention.

Let's agree right here at the outset that memory is made up of one part perception, one part intuition, and one part pure invention.

No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience.

The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.

For those who either perceive but dully, or retain the ideas that come into their minds but ill, who cannot readily excite or compound them, will have little matter to think on.

Men have two outstanding features--their brains and their genitalia. Unfortunately, both rarely function simultaneously.

It's all in your head -- you just have no idea how big your head is.