Quotes About Cognition

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.

Whatever we cannot understand easily we call God; this saves wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.

You don't see anything, do you? You see everything but the goddamn mind; you see all the little specs and crap, but you don't see what goes on, do you?

Your problem, dear chap, as I have had occassion to remind you, is that you see but you do not observe; you hear but you do not listen. For a literary man, Watson - and note that I do not comment on the merit of your latest account of my little problems - for a man with the pretenses of being a writer, you are singularly unobservant. Honestly, sometimes I am close to despair.

How curious it was, how ironic, he decided, that the human brain seemed capable of understanding almost everything but itself.

Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas.

Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.

There may be more danger in prejudices which are apparently founded in logic than in those which are acknowledged as emotions. (p69)

I'm not asleep... but that doesn't mean I'm awake.

All that is comes from the mind; it is based on the mind, it is fashioned by the mind.

Your safety gears are between your ears.

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

stress, which impairs memory, reduces neurogenesis.

But we may well ask, who are the players in these imaginary orchestras, exactly? And here is the answer: the objects and events in the world around our organisms, actually present or recalled from memory, and the objects and events in the world inside.

the memory of images, for example, the memory of a scene that we perceive in visual and auditory terms—is achieved by converting explicit images into a "neural code" that will later allow, by working in reverse, a more or less complete reconstruction in the process of image recall.

This is not to say that human feelings are not more complex and layered and elaborate than those of animals. How could they not be? But as I see it, the distinction in humans has to do with the web of associations that feeling states establish with all sorts of ideas and especially with the interpretations we can make of our present moment and of our anticipated future.

Memory, language, imagination, and reasoning are leading participants in cultural processes

It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.

All mind is made of images

the process of consciousness itself relies on images.