Quotes About Cognition

Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren't formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making.

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world," psychologist Barbara Tversky has observed.

Once we recognize this possibility, we can deliberately shape the material worlds in which we learn and work to facilitate mental extension—to enhance "the cognitive congeniality of a space," in the words of David Kirsh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

such as the one encapsulated in the seventh principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.

The difference such minimal instruction made in participants' ability to recall information, they noted, was "striking": students who incorporated movement into their learning strategy remembered 76 percent of the material, while those who engaged in "deliberate memorization" recalled only 37 percent.

In a related vein, the third principle: whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor.

Biophilic design is an emerging discipline, but a handful of studies have begun to suggest that working and learning in buildings inspired by nature can grant some of the same benefits for cognition as actually being outdoors.

Philosopher Andy Clark, observing the progressive delegation of our mental operations to our devices, has noted that "the mind is just less and less in the head" these days. More than that, the mind must be less and less in the head, and more and more emblazoned on the world, if we are to extend our minds with the minds of others.

Elements of the world outside may effectively act as mental "extensions," allowing us to think in ways our brains could not manage on their own.

Concluded Helga and Tony Noice in one of their academic articles, "One might paraphrase Descartes and say, 'I move, therefore I remember.'

When you think of intelligence, don't think of a college professor; think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don't have human intelligence, you're not even in the game.

I think, first and foremost, Marie Antoinette was intellectually impoverished. She really had never been introduced to the notion of abstract thinking - of thinking at all in any profound way.

The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules.

The thing we don't want to do is overstate the benefits, but there is all kinds of proof that exercise, both physical and mental, increases brain activity.

If you don't get a good night's sleep, the events of the day are not properly encoded in memory.

But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value.

The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.

The sleeplessness is proven; it eradicates your memory.

Emotions are the complex conjunction of physiological arousal, perceptual mechanisms, and interpretive processes; they are thus situated at the threshold where the noncultural is encoded in culture, where body cognition, and culture converge and merge.

He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.

Pero soy lento en el pensar, estoy lleno de normas interiores que actuan como frenos sobre mis deseos

He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive. -Tom Buchanan, The Great Gatsby

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.