Quotes About Cognition

Biologically and intellectually, reading allows the species to go "beyond the information given" to create endless thoughts most beautiful and wonderful.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert's famous description of the child's "grasshopper mind"6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically "hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

Anyone who still believes the archaic canard that we use only a tiny portion of our brains hasn't yet become aware of what we do when we read.

I worry that we are even closer to the stripping away of complex thoughts when they do not fit the memory-enfeebling restriction on the number of characters used to convey them.

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

When we reflect that "sentence"10 means, literally, "a way of thinking" . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry

If attention in the young child, which is spasmodic and exploratory by nature, becomes all the more attenuated because of constant input, those of us who are researchers have to figure out the downstream effects on memory and other aspects of cognitive development.

gifted children perceive the world in fundamentally different ways

Conversely, we do not need innumerable friends: according to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the human brain can only process approximately 150 interpersonal relations. This is known as Dunbar's number, and it's about the size of a small tribe.

Morpheus If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain

Our memory is massively influenced by the strength of our feelings at the time.

Human beings, as a rule, simply don't accept things that don't fit their worldview.

We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

Minds can't see what they can't handle. It's like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick.

but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality

I would later discover this was one of the key problems humans had with numerical understanding—their nervous systems simply weren't up to it.

And have you never walked into a room and wondered what you came in for? Have you never forgotten what you just did? Have you never blanked out or misremembered what you were just doing?

ese era uno de los problemas fundamentales que tienen los humanos con la comprensión numérica: simple y llanamente, su sistema nervioso no está capacitado.

Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.

Human beings, as a rule, simply don't accept things that don't fit their worldview.

About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called 'tree'. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

Technology's allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does.