Quotes About Cognition

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.

most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

Fending off Alzheimer's, he says, involves five key components: a diet rich in vegetables and good fats, oxygenating the blood through moderate exercise, brain training exercises, good sleep hygiene, and a regimen of supplements individually tailored to each person's own needs, based on blood and genetic testing.

It's the central executive in your brain that notices that the floor is dirty. It forms an executive attentional set for "mop the floor" and then constructs a worker attentional set for doing the actual mopping.

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.

What are the determinants in how we age? The different systems in our brains age at different rates. Some systems decline as others actually increase in efficiency and effectiveness. The basic message

neuroscientists have recently discovered that parts of the brain can fall asleep for a few moments or longer without our realizing it. At any given moment, some circuits in the brain may be off-line, slumbering, recouping energy, and as long as we're not calling on them to do something for us, we don't notice.

It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge. The average brain consists of 100 billion neurons.

Daniel J. Levitin

It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly

Most brain energy is used in synaptic transmission, that is, in connecting neurons to one another and, in turn, connecting thoughts and ideas to one another.

Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.

Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Understanding how the brain's attentional and memory systems interact can go a long way toward minimizing memory lapses.

The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.

Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.

Neurons are living cells, and they can connect to one another in trillions of different ways. These connections don't just lead to learning—the connections are the learning.

We make a number of reasoning errors due to cognitive biases.

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.

Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like.

Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows.