Quotes About Cognition

Theory of Mind to practical use—understanding how others see the world.

Each one helps us understand that our points of view are shaped by what we see, what we've been told, and, lastly, how we process it all.

gargantuan memory for facts

I have long contended that consciousness is the way information feels.

Fear plays a no less important role in the human psyche than all the other emotions. A psyche without fears would be crippled.

Every decision you ever made — the best ones and the worst ones — were, at their base, merely a product of your thinking at that time.

People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

Beauty is a sign of intelligence.

he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason.

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.

Knowledge determines to a great extent what we will pay attention to, perceive, learn, remember, and forget (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Sawyer, 2006). For example, compared to fourth-graders with little knowledge of soccer, fourth-graders who were soccer experts learned and remembered far more new soccer terms, even though the abilities of the two groups to learn and remember nonsoccer terms were the same.

When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.

Sometimes, I believe I actually see the wheels in my brain turning.

I tested in the top percentile for IQ, but I couldn't tie my shoes or really ride a bike without training wheels until I was almost 7.

A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness.

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be dominating thought in one's mind.

Our minds influence the key activity of the brain, which then influences everything; perception, cognition, thoughts and feelings, personal relationships; they're all a projection of you.

What helps with aging is serious cognition - thinking and understanding. You have to truly grasp that everybody ages. Everybody dies. There is no turning back the clock. So the question in life becomes: What are you going to do while you're here?