Quotes About Mind

The mind is like the ocean. And deep in the ocean, beneath the surface, it's calm and clear. And no matter what the surface conditions are like, whether it's smooth or choppy or even a full-strength gale up there, deep in the ocean it's tranquil and serene.

This means that more than 95% of the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, masters-level therapists, occupational therapists, educational therapists, movement therapists, dance therapists, art therapists, music therapists, and others had never been given a lecture defining the mind.

Given that the limbic area shapes how we appraise the meaning of events, knowing the hand model and seeing the limbic area's distinct location from the higher areas of the cortex can help us realize that sometimes a "feeling" is indeed not a fact.

Books, after all, are extraordinary things: thoughts made visible, paper and ink sculptures of the mind, time and space made into words. There's no end to judging so many books. But a literary editor's work is never what Ecclesiastes calls a weariness of the flesh. Rather, it's an animation of the spirit.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness.

The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance. No story of Google's unlikely success will meet that test, because no story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome. The human mind does not deal well with nonevents.

System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

The only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.

Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives.

Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.

What you see is all there is

I cater to a viewer because that viewer's taste matters more than anyone else's, and I will keep him first in mind and then, if it also appeals to the critics, so be it.

After all, what is cinema? It is an interaction, a discussion that throws up questions and provides some solutions. The solutions might look simple, impractical or too fictionalised. But one must realise that viewers empathise with certain characters because they strike a chord with the viewers' needs and frame of mind.

I think the British viewing and listening public are very fickle. If they like you they will listen to you, they will watch you. If they change their mind then it's all over.

Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be.

It's for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think, and then it's for the public to make up its own mind. We don't live in a priesthood where some small group imposes its views on other people - that's not the way that science works, and it's not the way a democratic society should work.

A consensus on realising the goal of universal suffrage is not unattainable if we bear the common good in mind, move a step further, and try to resolve the differences or even stop insisting on some of one's own views.

I felt like I'd spent many years making excuses for my executives and making excuses for political candidates I was representing and their views, when some of those political views, in my mind, were very distasteful.