Quotes About Comprehension

El enfoque económico no pretende describir el mundo como cualquiera de nosotros quisiera que fuera, o teme que sea, o reza por que llegue a ser, sino más bien explicar lo que hay en la realidad. La mayoría de nosotros querría arreglar o cambiar el mundo de alguna manera. Pero para cambiar el mundo, primero hay que comprenderlo.

But when something is easy to imagine, it's often because you've failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.

Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don't even have to think about reading once we've learned how to do it.

Even though we don't teach this particular skill in school, and we barely have a vocabulary to describe it, our mindreading abilities play a key role in our work and relationship successes, our sense of humor, our social ease.

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't.

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images

I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.

Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point.

The problem with thoughtless signposting is that the reader has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The

concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as "A herring is a mammal"), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one.

a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

You can only really understand something when you know what it is not.

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

Experiments that measure readers' comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot.

If people are mentally agile enough to interpret events in many ways, what's to prevent a child from interpreting the meaning of to nail as "to obscure a surface by nailing things to it," or to coil as "to cause a long object to have a filament coiled around it"?

sarchasm n. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." Though

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Our hearts do not need logic. They can love and forgive and accept that which our minds cannot comprehend. Hearts understand in ways minds cannot.