Mental Processes Quotes

#1. What we're seeking to do is internalize perception. Perception is very much involved with the senses and the mental processes and the emotional processes.

Frederick Lenz

#2. On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the developmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question.

Wilhelm Wundt

#3. Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can't believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.

Pat Schneider

#4. As a scientist I rebelled against the disorder, and I had long since discovered that nothing thwarted the mental processes like clutter.

Deanna Raybourn

#5. The results of ethnic psychology constitute, at the same time, our chief source of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental processes.

Wilhelm Wundt

#6. Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery.

Jack London

#7. A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

Northrop Frye

#8. Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.

Maria Montessori

#9. If two closely related species act the same under similar circumstances, the mental processes behind their behavior are likely the same, too. The alternative would be to postulate that, in the short time since they diverged, both species evolved different ways of generating the same behavior.

Frans De Waal

#10. People reveal so much of their mental processes online, simply because the psychological effect of anonymity just means that a whole raft of inhibitions are left alone when people log on.

Joanne Harris

#11. He belonged to that inarticulate order of young Englishmen who dislike any form of emotion, and who find it peculiarly hard to explain their mental processes in words.

Agatha Christie

#12. My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#13. The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.

Dalai Lama XIV

#14. In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.

Ada Lovelace

#15. Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.

James Thurber

#16. Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Robert Smithson

#17. Important lesson there: you don't survive in the field by obeying all the
rules, including those relating to mental processes

Terry Pratchett

#18. Remember that although they may speak a different language, they are still the same kind of people as the folks you know at home, have the same mental processes, are just as kindly and just as friendly. Remember that, quit talking and start over again - in pantomime.

Wally Byam

#19. They say Im demonic in humor in the sense that I think people need somebody to wake up their mental processes.

Kenneth Williams

#20. Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.

George Herbert Mead

#21. He reasoned that if choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.

David Eagleman

#22. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.

Dennis Gabor

#23. LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.

Stanislav Grof

#24. Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small.

Ray Kurzweil

#25. I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

A.S. Byatt

#26. When what is is congruent to what is supposed, the reaction is functional and the mental processes competent. When what is and what is supposed have nothing to do with each other, the choice of reactions is random. Something tears.

Samuel R. Delany

#27. The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements.

Gilbert Ryle

#28. To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards

Frances G. Wickes

#29. A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.
[Life magazine, December 10, 1965]

Rex Stout

#30. I shall suggest, on the contrary, that all communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, and that all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.

Michael Polanyi

#31. I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

Eric Kandel

#32. The health of the body is determined to a great degree by our mental processes: what we think of life and especially of ourselves, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels.

James Redfield

#33. Literalism involves a fundamental misconception of the mental processes of biblical man and ignorance of his modes of self-expression. It thus misrepresents the purport of the narrative, obscures the meaningful and enduring in it and destroys its relevancy.

Nahum M. Sarna

#34. Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions.

Jack London

#35. As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.

Steven Pinker

#36. Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.

Thomas J. Scheff

#37. The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.

Lynn Coady

#38. Physiological psychology, on the other hand, is competent to investigate the relations that hold between the processes of the physical and those of the mental life.

Wilhelm Wundt

#39. My brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

William Styron

#40. In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.

Patricia Churchland

#41. Psychology must not only strive to become a useful basis for the other mental sciences, but it must also turn again and again to the historical sciences, in order to obtain an understanding for the more highly developed metal processes.

Wilhelm Wundt

#42. When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

Antonio Damasio

#43. As physics is a mental reconstruction of material processes, perhaps a physical reconstruction of psychic processes is possible in nature itself.

Marie-Louise Von Franz