Quotes About Cognition

Food is a powerful drug. You can use it to help mood and cognitive ability or you can unknowingly make things worse.

Estrogen helps you think clearly. Progesterone helps you relax.

Evolve the Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

it's been estimated that the brain has the storage capacity of three million hours of TV shows (7).

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

This frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.

As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience—as soon as we have a stake in its goodness—our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.

The frontal lobe is the recent addition to the human brain that allows us to imagine the future.

not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor.

Just as an abacus can put two and two together to produce four without having thoughts about arithmetic, so brains can add past to present to make future without ever thinking about any of them.

Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we'll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what's happening in the present.

There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy. … They're controlled by different parts of the brain.

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.

Cognitive neuroscientists at Drexel and Northwestern universities have found that the flashes of insight that precede "Aha!" moments are accompanied by a large burst of neural activity in the brain's right hemisphere

largely metaphorical."7 In a complex world, mastery of metaphor—a whole-minded ability that some cognitive scientists have called "imaginative rationality"—has become ever more valuable

T]he left hemisphere [is] particularly good at recognizing serial events—events whose elements occur one after the other—and controlling sequences of behavior. The left hemisphere is also involved in controlling serial behaviors. The serial functions performed by the left hemisphere include verbal activities, such as talking, understanding the speech of other people, reading, and writing.

slipped on a cognitive banana peel

sharp-minded analytic capacities peak in the late morning or around noon

right hemisphere is responsible for our ability to comprehend metaphors

Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories." —ROGER C. SCHANK, cognitive scientist