Quotes About Cognition

In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

Un tempo avevo occhi molto buoni. Quello che hanno visto è un altro discorso. L'esperienza mi ha insegnato che si può guardar succedere qualcosa senza nemmeno vederlo.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

There is something you should know. And the right way to know it is by a cherrying of your mind.

XIII. HERAKLES' KILLING CLUB Little red dog did not see it he felt it All events carry but one

It is hard for fish to be aware of water. It is hard for us to notice something that's an ingrained pattern shaping our habitual thought.

The angrier you were, the less likely you were to think clearly.

From Camus' notebooks … "an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Truthseeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whether the truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is not naturally supported by the way we process information. We might think of ourselves as open-minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.

frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.

As with visual illusions, we can't make our minds work differently than they do no matter how smart we are. Just as we can't unsee an illusion, intellect or willpower alone can't make us resist motivated reasoning.

The actual outcome casts a shadow over your ability to remember what you knew at the time of the decision.

figure out why those things happened, we are susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only a correlation, or cherry-picking data to confirm the narrative we prefer. We will pound a lot of square pegs into round holes to maintain the illusion of a tight relationship between our outcomes and our decisions.

Making more rational decisions isn't just a matter of willpower or consciously handling more decisions in deliberative mind. Our deliberative capacity is already maxed out. We don't have the option, once we recognize the problem, of merely shifting the work to a different part of the brain, as if you hurt your back lifting boxes and shifted to relying on your leg muscles.

In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare favorably with our peers. We deny or at least dilute the most painful parts of the message.

This phenomenon is known as omission-commission bias.

This phenomenon is called the better-than-average effect.

Now for the bad news: Being smart doesn't make you less susceptible to the inside view. If anything, it makes it worse. It straps your beliefs into the driver's seat more firmly. Research across a variety of settings has shown that being smart makes you better at motivated reasoning, the tendency to reason about information to confirm your prior beliefs and arrive at the conclusion you desire.

Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. Let me give you a different intuitive frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.

The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them.

The challenge is not to change the way our brains operate but to figure out how to work within the limitations of the brains we already have. Being aware of our irrational behavior and wanting to change is not enough, in the same way that knowing that you are looking at a visual illusion is not enough to make the illusion go away.

Memory creep is the reconstruction of your memory of what you knew that hindsight bias creates.

Most of what we do daily exists in automatic processing. We have habits and defaults that we rarely examine, from gripping a pencil to swerving to avoid an auto accident. The challenge is not to change the way our brains operate but to figure out how to work within the limitations of the brains we already have.

It doesn't take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief.