Quotes About Cognition

My Lady has been thinking? My Lady must have a headache from all that effort.

Any Sitter would recognize

Intelligence is the ability to take information and make it meaningful.

The mind plays tricks. It rejects things until it thinks ? or something tells it ? that the remembering can be handled.

the connecting fibers of the corpus callosum;

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.

preintellectual awareness. The subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness.

From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.

I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was.

Moderate, transient stress (i.e., the good, stimulatory stress) promotes hippocampal LTP, while prolonged stress disrupts it and promotes LTD—one reason why cognition tanks at such times. This is the inverted-U concept of stress writ synaptic.4

Cognitive therapists, like Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania, even consider depression to be primarily a disorder of thought, rather than emotion, in that sufferers tend to see the world in a distorted, negative way.

these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that "it's only a figure of speech"—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors.

As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how the world works.

Various studies, predominantly by Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, show that when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest. Metaphorically, the frontal cortex says, "Screw it. I'm tired and don't feel like thinking about my fellow human.

when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest.

Thus, particularly important is a 2011 study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC; subjects became less likely to change their answer to conform.

The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.

Hormonal responses to various fetal and childhood experiences have epigenetic effects on genes related to the growth factor BDNF, to the vasopressin and oxytocin system, and to estrogen sensitivity. These effects are pertinent to adult cognition, personality, emotionality, and psychiatric health. Childhood abuse, for example, causes epigenetic changes in hundreds of genes in the human hippocampus.

So if whites see a black face shown at a subliminal speed, the amygdala activates.10 But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing, the anterior cingulate and the "cognitive" dlPFC then activate and inhibit the amygdala. It's the frontal cortex exerting executive control over the deeper, darker amygdaloid response.

The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it's not fully online until people are in their midtwenties.

Eine große Erkenntnis vollzieht sich nur zur Hälfte im Lichtkreise des Gehirns, zur anderen Hälfte in dem dunklen Boden des Innersten, und sie ist vor allem ein Seelenzustand, auf dessen äußerster Spitze der Gedanke nur wie eine Blüte sitzt.

Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don't believe it, try it sometime. But

Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don't believe it, try it sometime.