Quotes About Cognition

Thinking is the place where intelligent actions begin. We pause long enough to look more carefully at a situation, to see more of its character, to think about why it's happening, to notice how it's affecting us and others.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

I couldn't pay attention to a novel; I'd get three pages in and couldn't remember what it was about.

One person might be able to learn by reading, another will have a good audio memory, and another will make notes in different colored pens. I have a more multi sensory memory - I remember what I was doing when I learnt it and where I was.

I think more with my head - things are 90 per cent in your head, and everything else comes after that.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

When people don't understand what they're watching, a lot of what they perceive has to do with who they themselves are.

We perceive, we remember our experiences, we make judgments, we act - and in all of these endeavors, we are influenced by factors that we aren't aware of.

The modern brain is clogged with information, a huge percentage of which is non-essential to effective daily functioning.

Your brain has the power to modify your pain perception.

Comprehension follows perception.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

The new limitations are the human ones of perception.

You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention.

The thing of which the act of perception is the perception is experienced as something not mental.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.

Those who receive with most pains and difficulty, remember best; every new think they learn, being, as it were, burnt and branded in on their minds.

Exactly why having more cognitive complexity makes a species live longer isn't totally decided by science yet. But the simplest answer is probably the best answer: The species is using its intelligence to survive. Smart animals figure things out. They solve problems and learn to avoid predators.

intelligence is a human construct, not a biological thing)

So in most people, all these intelligence genes add and subtract against each other, to result in, on average, a single IQ point. The intelligence genes do not determine your IQ.

human beings are the only creatures conscious of our innate consciousness; we are the only creatures who know that we know.