Quotes About Cognition

One of the key practical lessons of modern neuroscience is that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain's firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself.

not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as "meaningful," it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.

while the downstairs brain is well developed even at birth, the upstairs brain isn't fully mature until a person reaches his mid-twenties.

The upstairs brain remains under massive construction for the first few years of life, then during the teen years undergoes an extensive remodel that lasts into adulthood.

not only is the upstairs brain under construction, but even the part of it that can function becomes inaccessible during moments of high emotion or stress.

El ejercicio aeróbico no sólo es beneficioso para los sistemas cardiovascular y músculo-esquelético, sino también para el sistema nervioso. Aprendemos con más eficacia cuando estamos activos físicamente.

self and mind may be deeply interrelated, with self being constructed from the experience of mind.

when kids learn even the fundamentals of playing piano, their brains develop differently from the brains of kids who don't, so they can more fully understand their own bodies in relationship to the objects around them.

prefrontally mediated, in which we attribute these shifts to what we've seen in the other person. Naturally, such a complex pathway can be bogged down by rigid valenced plateaus of probability, which skew accurate interpretations of the meaning of sensations.

Logic, responsibilities, and time don't exist for them yet. But when a toddler begins asking "Why?" all the time, you know that the left brain is beginning to really kick in.

Given that the limbic area shapes how we appraise the meaning of events, knowing the hand model and seeing the limbic area's distinct location from the higher areas of the cortex can help us realize that sometimes a "feeling" is indeed not a fact.

La corteza cerebral es la capa más externa del cerebro. También se le llama neocórtex o «nuevo cerebro mamífero» porque experimentó un gran desarrollo con la aparición de los primates y, sobre todo, con la aparición del ser humano.

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.