Quotes About Cognition

it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function.

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.

The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it.

Chalmers: It's awfully hard to define consciousness. But I'd start by saying that it's the subjective experience of the mind and the world. It's basically what it feels like, from the first-person point of view, to be thinking and perceiving and judging.

There's something it's like for me to see the green leaves outside my window right now, so that's a conscious state to me. But there may be some unconscious language-processing going on in my head that doesn't feel like anything to me, or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they're not conscious states of me, because there's nothing it's like for me to undergo those states.

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.

Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

If you're suffering, you're thinking.

Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware.

Living, dying, and thinking... they're all team sports.

Rule your mind or it will rule you.

The joy of the mind is the measure of its strength.

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality

When we play games, our brains respond differently to stress and obstacles. We're better able to control our attention and ignore distractions.

Spatial working memory is impaired by stress.

The reason humans experience so much more stress than other species isn't just because we think more, but also because we think differently.

The less you think counterfactually, the less you experience stress. Stress, in this light, isn't a bad thing. It's simply a warning system telling you that your mind has lost touch with what's real.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers for ever.

In all well-organized brains, the predominating idea—and there always is one—is sure to be the last thought before sleeping, and the first upon waking in the morning.

Any proposition containing the word is creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

To read is to ……….indulge yourself in mental masturbation.

Accordingly, he came to believe that his immediate environment was the world itself.

I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud. . . . I don't think I really saw all this. . . . I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it.