Quotes About Cognition

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

Of course, it is fairly easy to see that other people's minds operate this way; it is comparatively much harder to become aware that one's own mind is working that way also.

Furthermore, what you can say about what you saw depends on the structure of your symbolism — whether you describe it in English, Persian, Chinese, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, differential calculus or quaternions. This explains why, in Dr. Jones's words, whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.

Why do we say "dumb" (mute) for stupid? Because "a good mind means a good mouth," and the human mind is a verbalizing circuit.

If you hypnotized somebody and told him not to use the word "nose," and then asked him to explain the sense of smell, you would get the same kind of drifting linguistic snow banks in his answers. Intellectuals, who have more abstractions stored in their biocomputers, are more skilled at this than most, but all can do it to some extent.

is both amusing and frightening. It reminds us that each of us sees the world through perceptual structures (biochemical- neurological) which were laid down accidentally in our earliest moments. It raises the uneasy suspicion that...we may be simply chasing the particular Ping-Pong balls which, at those sensitive shutter moments, had been imprinted on our cortical film.

Constant reminding ourselves that we do not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.

That's what I mean by Guerrilla Ontology; it's getting people to think, giving them puzzles that force them to think.

IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . . I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.

If by some miracle I have managed to make sense out of this issue, where physicists themselves seem to have trouble understanding one another, the basic point of Copenhagenism seems to be similar to my own Nietzschean-existentialist view that the nonverbal or preverbal world never contained meters or kilograms or ergs of energy or photons or good or evil or beauty or meaning until primate nervous systems (human minds) put them there as systems of classification.

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

In terms of Information Theory, this appears as a dramatic increase in the amount of information processed per second. The more new circuits opened in the brain, the more new information you notice in even the simplest and most familiar objects or events. To quote Blake, The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.

According to Alfred Korzybski, any "idea" or mental state is a brain circuit which the brain itself can contemplate, thereby having an idea about the idea, or a mental state about the mental state, etc. There is no theoretical or real limit to the higher-ordering process; it is the "Infinity Within" of which mystics speak.

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.

language controls our thinking.

Language structures demark our reality-tunnels. I mentioned that earlier, but it needs repeating.

A simple analogy here will help. The psychopath is like a color-blind person who sees the world in shades of gray but who has learned how to function in a colored world.

Un pensamiento puede llegar a ser un sentimiento y un sentimiento puede llegar a ser un pensamiento.

I have a mind myself and recognize Mind when I meet with it in any guise.

All thought is a feat of association.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

that was humanity's problem right there. they are brain damaged from the early sun