Quotes About Cognition

A human brain is designed to experience pleasure when it understands something and fear or resistance when it doesn't.

When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on, and you're groggy and pointing at things saying circle and blue and car and then sex and job and health care.

neuroscientists claim the average human being spends more than 30 percent of their time daydreaming . . . unless they're reading, listening to, or watching a story unfold.

The brain remembers music and forgets about noise just like the brain remembers some brands and forgets about others.

Why? Because the human brain, no matter what region of the world it comes from, is drawn toward clarity and away from confusion.

Reading mysteries: the recreation of intelligent minds.

Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine intelligence.

Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

He realized how primitive this feeling was but, as a friend of his father had often said, he had only one head, so he had only one way to think about things.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being.

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business

However, current research in animal cognition, and on protolanguage, protomorality, ritual, and levels of consciousness, has shown that we may not be as unique as we think we are (cf. Peterson 1999: 283ff.).

1. Knowledge by acquaintance.

Knowledge by acquaintance is sometimes called "simple seeing," being directly aware of something.

J.P. Moreland

The important thing to note is that we humans have the power to "see," to be directly aware of, to directly experience a wide range of things, many of which are not subject to sensory awareness with the five senses.

The more you know about something, the more you're able to see when you look at it, the more you can remember about it, and the less tied you will be to following a mindless series of steps in working with what you know.

I use the term periconscious to suggest that higher forms of consciousness had to emerge evolutionarily from specific types of preconscious neural processes, and that the primitive affective systems that will be described in this text may have been the major gateways for the development of cognitively resolved awareness of values that appear to exist in the world.

Each emotional system is hierarchically arranged throughout much of the brain, interacting with more evolved cognitive structures in the higher reaches, and specific physiological and motor outputs at lower levels.

The notion that emotions are simply the result of our higher cognitive appreciation of certain forms of bodily commotion has been largely negated by the observation of essentially normal emotional responsivity in people who have suffered massive spinal cord injuries.

Situational awareness, Reece.

The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe—from sub-atomic particles to the universe—except itself.

I could see everything she said as if it were a wall painting inside the cave of my own skull.

mind and went