Quotes About Cognition

Philosophy is for the few.

the human brain is ill-equipped to make rational decisions. Our judgment is frequently torpedoed by emotions such as fear, greed, jealousy, and impatience; by prejudices that distort our perception of reality;

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

[Thinking is] what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe. I think maybe something like that happens with kids. You see what you want to see.

Is it that the eye finds what the mind is seeking?

Gin and catatonic?

I am aware that I am aware

The Private Life of the Brain (New York: John Wiley, 2000); John McCrone's Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) is a more easygoing, detailed exploration. David Hubel's Eye, Brain and Vision (San Francisco: Scientific American Library, 1988) is a fine vision of what seeing entails, presented by the scientist who did much to reveal

You haven't read anything until you've comprehended it.

How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people.

There is little scientific data on the point, but evidently people do speak to themselves.

Your thoughts create your emotions; therefore, your emotions cannot prove that your thoughts are accurate.

I don't know how to depict intelligence.

Experiments show that when you move your wrist at will, you consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement (Libet, 1985, 2004).But your brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before you consciously perceive your decision to move (FIGURE 3.4)! The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes arrives late to the decision-making party.

By one estimate, your five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which you consciously process about 40 (Wilson, 2002).

Good ideas in psychology usually have an oddly familiar quality, and the moment we encounter them we feel certain that we once came close to thinking the same thing ourselves and simply failed to write it down.

At any moment, you and I are aware of little more than what's on the screen of our consciousness. But beneath the surface, unconscious information processing occurs simultaneously on many parallel tracks.

Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one's tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience.11

Experience is a body of memories we use (on purpose or implicitly) to guide us. But we don't experience an event merely by living through it. To experience an event, we must live through and remember it.