Cognitive Quotes

#1. Our thoughts have prepared for us the
happiness or unhappiness we experience.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#2. Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability.

Derek Bok

#3. I do agree with Stich that a quick move from our evolutionary origins to the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is not legitimate. As I see it, the case for the reliability or unreliability of various cognitive mechanisms lies elsewhere.

Hilary Kornblith

#4. Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.

Loris Malaguzzi

#5. we see faces in the clouds, but never clouds in faces, because we have special cognitive modules for face detection.

Jonathan Haidt

#6. Humanity has pondered over the meaning of God since its beginning. It is one of those cognitive features that came along with the advent of modern Human Consciousness.

Abhijit Naskar

#7. Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.

Daniel Kahneman

#8. In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional.

Judith M Bardwick

#9. Excellent cognitive function starts in the kitchen because that's where the nutritional materials (whole foods) are prepared to act as our brain and body building blocks.

John Pierre

#10. What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.

Terence McKenna

#11. Consciousness may be seen as the haughty and restless second cousin of morphology. Memory is its mistress, perception its somewhat abused wife, logic its housekeeper, and language its poorly paid secretary

Gerald Edelman

#12. Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance.

Robert Thurman

#13. Hope is not an emotion; it's a way of thinking or a cognitive process.

Brene Brown

#14. The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence

Francisco Varela

#15. The greater our cognitive dissonance, the more creative our rationalizations, and the more important we will make the goals that we are pretending to accomplish.

Hugh Howey

#16. The thingy? You want me, the most intelligent cognitive processor in the known worlds, to say thingy?"
"Yes," I reaffirmed. "That is correct."
Do you stay up nights thinking of ways to humiliate me?" HARV asked.

John Zakour

#17. Emotion only lasts in our bodies for about 90 seconds. After that, the physical reaction dissipates, UNLESS our cognitive brain kicks in and starts connecting our anger with past events.

Jill Bolte Taylor

#18. To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

Edmund Husserl

#19. What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you.

Chris Abani

#20. When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.

Daniel Goleman

#21. Creative ideas make people uncomfortable. It turns out that, at least subconsciously, we can have a hard time recognizing ideas as both new and useful at the same time. This cognitive dissonance between creativity and practicality may actually create a subtle bias against creative ideas.

David Burkus

#22. I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game's rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence.

Konrad Lorenz

#23. Women with a higher intake of berries appeared to have delayed cognitive aging by 2.5 years. So it's like your brain is 2.5 years younger if you're eating berries.

Michael Greger

#24. Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well?

Stephen Jay Gould

#25. I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.

Steven Johnson

#26. You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [ ... ] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#27. Twelve-year-olds are eager to turn everything into arguments but don't have the cognitive skills to win them.

Linda Perlstein

#28. If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

George Lakoff

#29. Some children naturally have more cognitive control than others, and in all kids this essential skill is being compromised by the usual suspects: smartphones, TV, etc. But there are many ways that adults can help kids learn better cognitive control.

Daniel Goleman

#30. The Board needs to extend its insight and innovation lens via cognitive difference.

Pearl Zhu

#31. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking.

Daniel J. Levitin

#32. The similarity between space and time is limpid enough that we routinely use space to represent time in calendars, hourglasses, and other time-keeping devices. And the cognitive similarity also shows up in everyday metaphors where spatial terms are borrowed to refer to time.

Steven Pinker

#33. (A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.

David Brooks

#34. Memory results from a process of continual re-categorization which, by its nature, must be procedural and involve continual motor activity and repeated rehearsal.

Gerald Edelman

#35. The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.

Paul Gibbons

#36. A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place.

Thomas Metzinger

#37. An explosive outburst - like other forms of maladaptive behavior - occurs when the cognitive demands being placed upon a person outstrip that person's capacity to respond adaptively.

Ross W. Greene

#38. We need to protect the same amount of cognitive liberty in an age where you can invade people's thoughts without physically intruding into their homes than you did at the time of the framing.

Jeffrey Rosen

#39. If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation- deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions.
- Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy

Ryan Holiday

#40. The heated debates about Homo sapiens' 'natural way of life' miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

Yuval Noah Harari

#41. Just as a man working with his tools should know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know its limitations.

Charlie Munger

#42. I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

David Chalmers

#43. Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

John Medina

#44. Once past this cognitive divide, secreted neuro-chemicals wash through cellular landscapes and the brain registers human possibility

Elizabeth Howell

#45. It will be cheering to know that many people are skillful chessplayers, though in many instances their brains, in a general way, compare unfavorably with the cognitive faculties of a rabbit.

James Mortimer

#46. When looking at the brain, it is important to go beyond its structure to its function. This is because often in cognitive disorders, the structure of the brain is intact, but its function is compromised.

Aditi Shankardass

#47. As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#48. To taking an action that could make life even worse. Psychologists call this "loss aversion." Research in cognitive

Jerome Groopman

#49. Head injuries are a significant risk to accelerated cognitive decline.

Steven Magee

#50. Buddhists were actually the first cognitive-behavioral therapists.

Jack Kornfield

#51. Imagination, abstraction, creativity, and coherence etc are some inherently cognitive and mental elements of architect-wise thinking.

Pearl Zhu

#52. Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public.

Clay Shirky

#53. Regression analyses show that self-efficacy contributes to achievement behavior beyond the effects of cognitive skills

Albert Bandura

#54. The psychologist Mark Schaller has shown that disgust is part of what he calls the "behavioral immune system" - a set of cognitive modules that are triggered by signs of infection or disease in other people and that make you want to get away from those people.40

Jonathan Haidt

#55. There is no medicine or other intervention that appears to be nearly as effective as exercise in maintaining or even bumping up a person's cognitive abilities.

Gretchen Reynolds

#56. In social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy results from diverse sources of information conveyed vicariously and through social evaluation, as well as through direct experience

Albert Bandura

#57. A cup of blueberries a day may keep cognitive decline away.

Brant Cortright

#58. Reports that online cognitive behavioral treatment can be as effective as in-person psychotherapy suggest that technology will expand access, extend the impact of a therapist, and expedite treatment for people who might not find 'seeing' a therapist acceptable.

Thomas R. Insel

#59. Muse is the brain-sensing headband that allows you to track your cognitive and emotional activity. It boosts your attention and helps you become more aware of the emotions that you're having.

Ariel Garten

#60. people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control. With

Gary Hennerberg

#61. The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

Steven Pinker

#62. When it comes to describing our potential physical and cognitive capacities, we are individuals first, and members of the human race second.

Alexandra Horowitz

#63. One of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone.

Charles Stross

#64. In its totality, a raga is a combination of musical heritage, technical elements, emotional charge, cognitive understanding and aural identity.

T.M. Krishna

#65. I don't know if what I'm seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they're not worms, or whether I want them to be worms or not, or what I have to believe about this woman if they aren't worms, or about the world or human bodies or this disease if they are.

Leslie Jamison

#66. The often-used phrase "pay attention" is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.

Daniel Kahneman

#67. The point about positive thinking, and later cognitive behavioural therapy, was that you could choose how you thought about life, and that how you thought about it changed not only your interpretation of what happened, but also the actual course of events.

Jenny Alexander

#68. I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Steven Pinker

#69. If you are born into poverty, the chances are good that your children will be born into poverty. Find a way to give poor kids the same cognitive stimulus that rich kids receive, and they should end up with the same tools for success.

George Kaiser

#70. It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#71. Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

Daniel J. Levitin

#72. When I talk about "cyborg literacy," I mean a set of skills and social practices that optimize the ability to use physical and cognitive technologies to augment, amplify, or extend human thinking and communication capabilities.

Howard Rheingold

#73. The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

Edward Tufte

#74. It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence. Psychology has come a long way.

Daniel Kahneman

#75. I've had a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy, and am having a family now.

Trisha Goddard

#76. Evaluate the demands in your child's life (at home and at school) - and find at least one "cognitive unicycle" that may be sabotaging him or her. Then, if you can, get rid of it.

Todd Rose

#77. Children born to teens have less supportive and stimulating environments, poorer health, lower cognitive development, and worse educational outcomes. Children of teen mothers are at increased risk of being in foster care and becoming teen parents themselves, thereby repeating the cycle.

Jane Fonda

#78. ALS does not affect cognitive process. Stephen Hawking, one of smartest people on the planet, has ALS. It rarely affects the eyes. It doesn't affect senses like hearing, taste and touch.

Steve Gleason

#79. Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.

William James

#80. Mindless action without a real understanding of the ramifications is only likely to result in serious miscalculations or a colossal waste of time. Avoid both by using your judgment, filtered through both knowledge and experience. Use common sense and logic as a counterbalance to emotion.

David Amerland

#81. Being poor, for example, reduces a person's cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone's bandwidth.

Sendhil Mullainathan

#82. Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.

Neel Burton

#83. A visit to Israel is always an experience in cognitive dissonance. The Israel you personally see and hear is so completely different from the Israel you read and hear about in the media.

Alan Dershowitz

#84. I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow ... it is the honest state before the apple.

D.H. Lawrence

#85. One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.

Iain M. Banks

#86. Cognitive therapists focus on getting patients to see the glass as half-full rather than half-empty. Being positive has become rather a fetish. A more radical tactic would be to abolish the need for evaluation and just accept the glass as it is, whether it be cracked or brimming.

Gwyneth Lewis

#87. The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.

Rodolfo R. Llinas

#88. What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker's cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz's moral purpose (building an integrated self).

David Brooks

#89. Love is a cognitive, willful act. Feelings have very little to do with it, particularly around three o'clock in the morning when the baby needs changing or somebody has "lost it" before getting to the bathroom to throw up.

Kevin Leman

#90. Cognitive liberty begins at home, behind your eyes and between your ears. The first act of liberation is to step forward, and be counted as one of us.

Mark Pesce

#91. We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

Niall Ferguson

#92. Starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call "the great reversal." Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in - and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

Ken Wilber

#93. cognitive scientists studying human perception agree: we don't experience objective reality; we experience a model of objective reality that our brain creates for us.

Steve Volk

#94. -Appointments? You can't be serious. With all due respect, they have the cognitive capacity of chimpanzees right now.-

-And if we want to change that, we will start treating them as human beings, not a mob of apes.-

Neal Shusterman

#95. It may seem demeaning to the vanity of some individuals, but like all elements of the mind, God and all its correlated sensations of divinity are the majestic creations of neurobiology.

Abhijit Naskar

#96. Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

Sidney Hook

#97. We perceive through our senses a person, a situation or an event, and in an instant, we project our mental models - our fears, background and experiences - onto that perception. This often results in cognitive errors, which means we judge and respond incorrectly.

Elizabeth Thornton

#98. There is the experience of enlightenment, to be very aware of what lies beyond the boundaries of cognitive perception, reflection and self-awareness as seen by the personality.

Frederick Lenz

#99. The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.

Abhijit Naskar

#100. The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due.

Carl Sagan