Quotes About Cognition

Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape

Consciousness is the hard problem.

You can say that if you went crazy then you were crazy, and you couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. But that isn't the way it works, not in the real world. I mean, that's the sad thing about insane people; almost all of them know perfectly well that something is seriously wrong with them; that's what makes them so scared, so depressed. They know.

Sheer dumb sentience.

In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human

We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.

Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.

But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing.

The brain is a funny animal," he muttered

monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity's most common cognitive errors.

Reality is not a matter of our senses. It can't be visualized.

We are always more confident of our reasoning than we should be. Indeed overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence, is one of the most common illusions we experience. No doubt this analysis is yet another example: do we really know any of this?

Our vision is often more abstracted by what we think we know than by our lack of knowledge.

Brains are the only things worth having in this world

No man can use his brain to think for another.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

I think the sexiest thing on anybody is intelligence. I respect somebody who has a brain and wants to use it more than a pretty face and status.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

Ninety percent of all mental errors are in your head.

Experience itself depends on memory, which permits us to recall facts and to draw our conclusions from them, on which facts reasoning is based.

Vaunted "human intuition" is in reality "pattern recognition.

The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution