Quotes About Cognition

we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don't understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be.

14. Song and Schwarz, "If It's Hard to Read, It's Hard to Do.

Every belief about every aspect of the world is based on countless inferences we make via mental processes we can't observe.

New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed.

Wealth, too, is often separated into various mental accounts. At the bottom of this hierarchy sits the money that is easiest to spend: cash.

our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.

If learning is crucial, then as the stakes go up, decision-making quality is likely to go down.

choices depend, in part, on the way in which problems are described.

Knowing something about the cognitive system has allowed others to discover systematic biases in the way we think.

This confirmed my longheld suspicion that many people use spreadsheets as an alternative to thinking.

Humans have limited time and brainpower. As a result, they use simple rules of thumb—heuristics—to help them make judgments.

It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices they face into the experiences they will have.

Drawing on some well-established findings in social science, we show that in many cases, individuals make pretty bad decisions—decisions they would not have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and complete self-control.

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind. Studies

Everything is mental

Con qué rapidez se acepta lo increíble si se ve con frecuencia!

His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems.

found that scientists think about problems in much the same way artists do. Scientists and artists proved less similar in personality than in cognition, but both groups were similarly different from businessmen.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.

Cognition begins with sensation.

Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.