Quotes About Cognition

You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.

But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn't happen to me

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

Your memory is a monster; you forget -it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

You think you have a memory; but it has you! Later

and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you! Later, I would remember everything.

The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.

Yet of this massive flow of information no more than about 40 bits per second actually reaches consciousness. We are, in other words, conscious of only a trivial slice of all the information coming into the brain for processing.

thought itself is best understood as planning; even higher forms of thought, such as philosophy, the epitome of disembodied speculation, proceed, they argue, by hijacking algorithms originally developed to help us plan movements.

feeling was an integral component of the machinery of reason.

Accordingly, no book can actually embody the knowledge of anything of philosophical importance; only a mind can do that, since only a mind can have this capacity to interpret and reinterpret its own understandings.

A form of self-delusion.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

[An educated person:] One who voluntarily does more thinking than is necessary for his own survival.

Figuring out how to think about the problem.

A good brain ain't diddley, if you don't have the facts.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out brains to make room for it.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

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

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.