Quotes About Cognition

MANKIND IN AMNESIA (1982)

Your intellect will not remember unless you can refresh it with notes.

Our own life form was accordingly dubbed HOMO (genus Man), sapiens (species CAN THINK), sapiens (subspecies KNOWS HE CAN THINK).

Yet how do we do so and still avoid the madness that such wakefulness can bring on?

didn't think of it." She supposed she should have

On croit que j'imagine — ce n'est pas vrai — je me souviens. [They say I imagine — it is not true — I remember.]

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

One cannot simply perceive everything, to be able to perceive everything would be to tedious

Acquire a government over your ideas, that they may come down when they are called, and depart when they are bidden.

thinking, as primary function, can readily pair with intuition as auxiliary, or indeed equally well with sensation, but…never with feeling.

Intuitives tend to define intelligence as "quickness of understanding" and so prejudge the case in their own favor, for intuition is very quick.

Whereas the intuitive children like to learn by insight, the sensing children prefer to learn by familiarization.

But he wasn't really thinking properly. It was as if the thoughts were chasing each other round and round his head without managing to catch up with each other.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. (Terence sent me this quote the other day. A good battle cry, I believe... and one I wholeheartedly respect.)

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.

In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image.

La mia ricerca dell'esattezza si biforca in due direzioni. Da una parte la riduzione degli avvenimenti contingenti a schemi astratti con cui si possano compiere operazioni e dimostrare teoremi; e dall'altra parte lo sforzo delle parole per render conto con la maggior precisione possibile dell'aspetto sensibile delle cose.

If you learn something slowly, you forget it slowly. If you learn something very quickly, you forget it immediately.

Thinking is thinking. It happens in spite of a person. … I don't have any choice. This stuff I'm talking about is on my mind whether or not I want it to be. English Creek

Any significant input that is received in your brain triggers neural activity that cannot simply be erased or deleted as though it never happened.

How do we know that we exist? No one knows. Not so, you say. I think, therefore I exist. But how do you know that you think? No one knows that either. You just do.

Om iets te zien moet je eerst iets kunnen herkennen. Zonder herinnering kun je alleen maar kijken. Dan glijd de wereld spoorloos door je heen.