Quotes About Cognition

Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts" in your conscious mind at once. That's it. "We're very, very single-minded." We have "very limited cognitive capacity." This is because of the "fundamental structure of the brain," and it's not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.

When we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes 'a certain amount of bandwidth,' and when we turn off the spotlight, 'we still have the same bandwidth - it's just we can allocate more of those resources' towards other ways of thinking. 'So it's not like attention necessarily goes down - it just shifts,' to other, crucial forms of thinking.

three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering. First, you are slowly making sense of the world.

Some scientists in the field believe that dreaming somehow helps you to adapt emotionally to waking events.

brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.

Sleep deprivation damages memory as well.

This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead.

Reading is a unique form of consciousness, while we read we direct attention outward to the page but also at the same time inwards as we imagine and mentally stimulate.

The man of understanding finds everything laughable.

A person hears only what they understand.

The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavour to efface them.

Every game we play activates our brain, and it's the same brain we have in real life as we have in the game.

The life of the mind is always more interesting than the real. The idea is often more interesting than the actual.

One of the most difficult things to do in life is thinking; that's why so few people engage in it.

The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

Not purpose but chance is at the heart of mental life.

The brain is just the physical machine that runs the program called the mind. The brain is the hardware, the mind is the software.

It has long been known that learners remember responses they generate themselves better than those responses that are given to them, and this is now often called the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). In particular, one hour students spend writing test questions on what they have been studying results in more learning for them than one hour spent working with a study guide, answering practice tests, or leaving the students to their own devices (Foos, Mora, & Tkacz, 1994).

The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.

In short, early Homo sapiens had adquired the cognitive ability to enter into a conversation with the gods, just as modern Homo sapiens does today.

a mature understanding of death appears to be one of the last milestones in the cognitive development and evolution of the human brain.

I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane. Even if the dogs are small.