Quotes About Mind

It's official. Highway patrolmen are not susceptible to the Jedi Mind Trick.

Running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

Letting go of the conventional wisdoms that torment us. Letting go of the artificial limits that hold us back—and of the fear of admitting what we don't know. Letting go of the habits of mind that tell us to kick into the corner of the goal even though we stand a better chance by going up the middle.

When someone is heavily invested in his or her opinion, it is inevitably hard to change the person's mind.

But running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order. —John Adams

Already the dream was coming apart, its bright silk strands unwinding into nebulous emotions, little coloured clouds of feeling being dispersed by the movement of my waking-up mind. This is how it's always been with Light Bulb Fragment dreams; by the time I'm fully awake, they're gone.

That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.

to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.

The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these serendipitous connections, on all the appropriate scales: in the private space of your own mind; within larger institutions; and across the information networks of society itself.

The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.

transient hypofrontality removes our sense of self. With parts of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, there's no risk assessor, future predictor, or inner critic around to monitor the situation. The normal safety measures kept in place by the conscious mind are no longer. This is another reason why flow states significantly enhance performance: when the "self" disappears, it takes many of our limits along for the ride.

I've gotten really good at pulling the veil down," says Way, "at camouflaging reality, locking out my conscious mind and riding my focus into the zone.

As William James pointed out, humans are habit machines.

The conscious mind is a potent tool, but it's slow, and can manage only a small amount of information at once. The subconscious, meanwhile, is far more efficient. It can process more data in much shorter time frames. In ecstasis, the conscious mind takes a break, and the subconscious takes over.

Rather than treating our psychology like the unquestioned operating system (or OS) of our entire lives, we can repurpose it to function more like a user interface (or UI)—that easy-to-use dashboard that sits atop all the other, more complex programs. By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed, we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration.

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

The conscious mind—the self or soul—is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.

Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him what jazz is: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

The two deepest questions about the mind are "What makes intelligence possible?" and "What makes consciousness possible?

the [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind.