Quotes About Cognition

Nothing happens or comes to be without being thought first:

What we seem to perceive influences what we feel, and what we feel influences what we say we perceive

this whiff of tissue harbors our mental maps—and our memories. In fact, our recollections appear to be all bound up with where we experienced an event.

New research shows that when we recall an event, the place cells in our hippocampus that store the location of that event fire again, helping us to locate a memory in both space and time. This explains why retracing your steps can help you remember what you were looking for.

Words will do that. We are a naming species, and what we call things influences the way we think about them and the experiments we deem worthy of doing.

The imagination is not a single mental phenomenon or skill, but multifactorial, a constellation of related activities contributing constitutively to the full dimensionality of human consciousness and our relations to the world.

If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience", & if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain, then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?

Hit me with all those thinky thoughts,

he answer to your first riddle," I told him. "If yes is no and once is never, then the number of sides a triangle has… is… two." I drew out my reply, not bothering to explain how I'd arrived at my answer

Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture's basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains' basic formation.

We examine our sense of reality, of memory, and we must conclude that it is flawed.

Remembering is mental time travel.

What concerns me is not the way things are, but the way people think things are.

the ability to make good use of impressions

The intellectual cannot operate at room temperature.

We do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain" (Frith 2007).

Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality. (Frith 2007)

Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.

Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality.

Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.

The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.

Les habitants de la terre se divisent en deux, Ceux qui ont un cerveau, mais pas de religion, Et ceux qui ont une religion, mais pas de cerveau.

Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life.

The world out there is inherently hard to understand and human brains are not wired to understand it well.