Quotes About Mind

In the last few months, perhaps because he has had no one to speak to -- or at least no interlocutor who can respond with actual out-loud speech -- he has learned how to let different parts of his mind and heart speak within him as if they were different souls with their own arguments.

But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.

it's the mind analogy that bothers Crozier the most. Haunted and plagued by melancholia much of his life, knowing it as a secret weakness made worse by his twelve winters frozen in arctic darkness as an adult, feeling it recently triggered into active agony by Sophia Cracroft's rejection

I miei pensieri erano come mercurio... scivolavano sempre via, prima che potessi afferrarli o sagomarli in forma coerente.

The advanced neocortex in the mind vampires we encounter is merely along for the ride. Mind vampires can speak words fluidly and feign altruism and social niceties, but all a mind vampire (as is true with any sociopath) really knows is fight or flight, ascendancy or submission, and hierarchy and control. And violence. Always violence. The violence of their will over yours. And they live to control you.

Human thought can be described as a standing wavefront. Sort of a superhologram. Or, maybe more precisely, a hologram containing a few million smaller holograms.

Bessel van der Kolk: "The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." —

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety—as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.

One of the things anxiety educates you in is how deeply physical thought can be, how concrete. In anxiety, there is no time to luxuriate in abstractions. It's just you and your mind, which has fists and is using them. It may be dualistic and logically untenable to posit the situation as You v. Head; it may not make sense philosophically. But in the throes of anxiety? In the cognitive shit? There's really no other way to think about what's going on.

and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind. (2)

There are some secret moving Springs in the Affections, which when they are set a going by some Object in View, or be it some Object, tho' not in View, yet render'd present to the Mind by the Power of Imagination, that Motion carries out the Soul by its Impetuosity to such violent eager Embracings of the Object, that the Absence of it is insupportable.

Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the "cognitive unconscious" presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it.7 Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.

We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.

shapes those feelings.

In many or most moments these minds are exquisitely coordinated; feelings are essential to thought, thought to feeling. But when passions surge the balance tips: it is the emotional mind that captures the upper hand, swamping the rational mind.

La mente creativa es un don sagrado y la mente racional un sirviente fiel –dijo, en cierta ocasión, Albert Einstein–. Por ello resulta muy curioso que hayamos creado una sociedad que, olvidando el don, haya acabado honrando al sirviente.»

The emotional mind takes its beliefs to be absolutely true, and so discounts any evidence to the contrary. That is why it is so hard to reason with someone who is emotionally upset: no matter the soundness of your argument from a logical point of view, it carries no weight if it is out of keeping with the emotional conviction of the moment.

At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, which sometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out of control. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to be due to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asian cultures dub "monkey mind," for its wildly frenetic randomness.

As we all know from experience, when it comes to shaping our decisions and our actions, feeling counts every bit as much—and often more—than thought.

These regions very likely underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.

emotional and rational minds are semi-independent faculties, each, as we shall see, reflecting the operation of distinct, but interconnected, circuitry in the brain.

These two minds, the emotional and the rational, operate in tight harmony for the most part, intertwining their very different ways of knowing to guide us through the world.