Quotes About Cognition

that childlike inability to distinguish what is true from what we'd like to be true.

Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination.

they experience—what they see, hear, think, and

Physics appears to be a complicated subject, because the ideas of physics are difficult for us to understand. Our brains were designed to understand hunting and gathering, mating and child-rearing: a world of medium-sized objects moving in three dimensions at moderate speeds.

It is precisely because our own human senses are not capable of doing what bats do that we find it hard to believe. Because we can only understand it at a level of artificial instrumentation, and mathematical calculations on paper, we find it hard to imagine a little animal doing it in its head.

Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain.

Sterelny challenges us to explain 'how we can be simultaneously so smart and so dumb'.75

The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of 'rival' memes.

J. Anderson Thomson, bir evrimsel psikiyatristin bak?? aç?s?yla bunun için bana baÅŸka bir sebep gösterir: Hepimizin sahip olduÄŸu, cans?z nesneleri sanki birer ajanlarm?? gibi kiÅŸiselleÅŸtirmeye olan psikolojik eÄŸilimimiz. Thomson'un söylediÄŸi üzere, bir gölgeyi h?rs?z sanmaya, bir h?rs?z? gölge sanmaktan daha yatk?n?zd?r.

A brain that is good at simulating models in imagination is also, almost inevitably, in danger of self-delusion.

There are more cells in your brain than there are brains in your entire body.

he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know.

Two Dimensions of Executive Skills: Thinking and Doing Executive skills involving thinking (cognition) Working memory Planning/prioritization Organization Time management Metacognition Executive skills involving doing (behavior) Response inhibition Emotional control Sustained attention Task initiation Goal-directed persistence Flexibility

Working memory involves two different but related skills. The first is the ability to hold information in mind while performing complex tasks.

A related but more complex aspect of working memory gives us the ability to draw on past learning or experience and apply it to the situation at hand or predict future outcomes.

What makes the bias particularly pernicious is that we all recognize this bias in others but not in ourselves.

the current situation being a toss-up as to what you want to believe. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. Hence you will find that often what you believe is what you want to believe, rather than being the result of careful thinking.

Over the course of a few generations, the average intelligence in an aristocratic family fell toward the population average, hastened by marriages that matched bride and groom by lineage, not ability.

A true cognitive elite requires a technological society.

But school is in itself, more immediately and directly than any other institution, the place where people of high cognitive ability excel and people of low cognitive ability fail.

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.

I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.

This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.

but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.