Quotes About Cognition

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that "the art of remembering is the art of thinking," he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it's well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK

The words in books didn't just strengthen people's ability to think abstractly; they enriched people's experience of the physical world, the world outside the book.

The generation effect requires precisely the kind of struggle that automation seeks to alleviate.

Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think," said the novelist David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005.

Bruce Friedman,

In a renowned 1956 paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," Princeton psychologist George Miller observed that working memory could typically hold just seven pieces, or "elements," of information.

We are how we read.

When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it's a mistake to assume that more is better.

All work is knowledge work. The carpenter's mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary's. The architect's accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter's do.

Fully transferring an explicit memory from the hippocampus to the cortex is a gradual process that can take many years.

The brain, packed neatly into the bone-crate of the skull, gives us no sensory signal of its existence. We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.

lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in "inanimate objects.

Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we're online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.

The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.

The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage.

reading books chronically understimulates the senses."11

hypertext readers often "could not remember what they had and had not read.

We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.

A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things.

We don't constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory - but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, by bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.

the neuro- in neurodiversity is most usefully understood as referring not just to the brain but to the entire nervous system–and, by extension, to the full complexity of human cognition and the central role the nervous system plays in the embodied dance of consciousness"(Walke2021, p. 55).

She was beginning to see patterns, learning how to think.