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Cognitive Science Quotes

Browse 101 quotes about Cognitive Science.

Cognitive Science Quotes

“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.”

ActionEmotionPsychologyLogicDecision MakingCognitive Science
Book:The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions
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“Indoctrination is not just demeaning to the human conscience, it is lethal for the flourishing psychology of the hungry, young mind.”

PhilosophyEducationWise WordsWords Of WisdomBrainy QuotesPearls Of WisdomPhilosophy QuotesWise QuotationsFundamentalismEducational PhilosophyEducational QuotesIndoctrinationPhilosophy Of ScienceCognitive ScienceScience Of MindIndoctrination Quotes
Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
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“The purpose of education should ultimately be the advancement of the species. And for this to actually happen, the world needs the kind of education by means of which character is formed, strength of the mind is increased and the human intellect is expanded beyond its own limits.”

PhilosophyEducationKnowledgeWise WordsWords Of WisdomPerceptionBrainy QuotesPearls Of WisdomPhilosophy QuotesWise QuotationsFundamentalismEducational PhilosophyCharacter BuildingEducational QuotesIndoctrinationPhilosophy Of ScienceKnowledge WisdomCognitive ScienceScience Of MindIndoctrination Quotes
Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
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“In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.”

ReasonPhilosophyLogicMetaphorConceptCognitive ScienceEmbodied Mind
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“The Human Animal (A Sonnet) The civilized know how uncivilized they are, The uncivilized insist on being deemed civilized. The victor knows the fallacy of being the victor, The wise knows there is no such thing as being wise. The real human is aware of their inhuman predispositions, While the inhuman fails to acknowledge all primitive bent. And there is no question of the rise of civilization, If there is no question of questioning the self. The animal is animal for it lacks the brain capacity, For self-correction beyond the need of self-preservation. But more animal than animal is the so-called human being, That despite having the brains, fails to act in ascension. It is no human that does not know how animal they are. The animal becomes human, the moment it becomes aware.”

Human NatureMindfulnessEvolutionary PsychologySelf RegulationCognitive ScienceAnimal BehaviorPsychology PoetryNeuroscience PoemBiases And PrejudiceGood And Animal
Book:Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz
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“All men either consciously or subconsciously crave for authority over their environment, especially over their peers in the society, male and female alike. Women on the other hand, crave for intimacy especially from their female peers in the society. Colloquially this is what you call “gossiping”.”

LifeTruthSciencePsychologyHuman NatureBrainy QuotesGossipHuman MindWomanhoodManhoodNeuropsychologyCognitive ScienceMan And WomanGossip GirlGossip QuotesGossipingMan And Woman QuoteMale ThinkingWomanhood QuotesMale And Female
Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
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“The female brain is engineered to avoid conflicts at all cost, whereas the male brain pleasures conflicts in the purpose of being the boss.”

LifeTruthSciencePsychologyHuman NatureBrainy QuotesHuman MindWomanhoodManhoodNeuropsychologyCognitive ScienceMan And WomanMan And Woman QuoteMale ThinkingWomanhood QuotesMale And Female
Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
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“The extension of minds into the world through the use of artifacts was perhaps the last vital step in the evolution of culture that underlies the modern mind. Written symbols, alphabets and number systems, are ways of using the world to hold ideas. These external symbols allow a society a capacity for systematic thinking that would be impossible otherwise, a process we have referred to earlier as progressive externalization. Indeed, these external devices are not just static devices for memory storage. We have built external devices that process information, mirroring the process of thought inside our heads, at least loosely. Consider numerical calculation. You are limited in the amount of numbers you can easily add in your head. A paper and pencil increase this ability tremendously by letting you manipulate external symbols and hold intermediate steps in the calculation. By using artifacts that themselves process symbols, such as a handheld calculator, however, you can dramatically extend the realm of thought.”

LearningIntelligenceCognitive ScienceBrain ScienceCultural EvolutionExtended Cognition
Book:Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are – Understanding Cultural Biology and the Ancient Systems Behind Our Humanity
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“When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work. Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.”

LearningArchitectureExpertiseRememberingSpecializationCognitive ScienceInformation Organization
Book:The Sciences of the Artificial
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“Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.”

ReasonFreedomIllusionMetaphorThoughtLimitationSelf KnowledgeAutonomyCognitive ScienceEmbodied Mind
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath. The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience.”

GodReligionSpiritualityMetaphorCognitionCognitive ScienceEmbodied Mind
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“Teaching children to read has been superseded by an emphasis on developing literacy, which includes text, but also using sound, pictures, video, and other media. Reading as I've construed it is hardly a part of literacy in this sense, its role being comparable to spelling or typing. Yet the reading education part—helping children to become skilled readers, to be motivated to read, and to be able to comprehend and interpret texts for various purposes—is not easy.”

ReadingEducationTeachingBooksLiteracyCognitive ScienceAlternative Literacies
Book:Language at the Speed of Sight
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“A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. [T]here are many parallels between choice architecture and more traditional forms of architecture. A crucial parallel is that there is no such thing as a “neutral” design. [A]s good architects know, seemingly arbitrary decisions, such as where to locate the bathrooms, will have subtle influences on how the people who use the building interact. [S]mall and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior. [I]n many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. Good architects realize that although they can’t build the perfect building, they can make some design choices that will have beneficial effects. And just as a building architect must eventually build some particular building, a choice architect must [for example] choose a particular arrangement of food options at lunch, and by so doing she can influence what people eat. She can nudge.”

DecisionsSocial PsychologyNudgeCognitive ScienceCognitive PsychologyNudgingChoice ArchitectureDecision ScienceLibertarian Paternalism
Author:Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein
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“Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable. Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow. And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness. The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.”

Science FictionPataphysicsSurrealismSpeculative FictionCognitive ScienceAuditoryWeird FictionSurrealisticOlfactorySensory ProcessingStimuliMole FliesPuppet Dictator
Book:Don't Forget to Breathe
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“The Minimal Cognitive Grid (MCG) provides a non-subjective, graded, evaluation framework allowing both quantitative and qualitative analysis about the cognitive adequacy and the human-like performances of artificial systems (in both single and multi-tasking settings). In principle (and in perspective), the psychometric declination of one of its composing dimensions (in particular the “performance match”) could be also useful to evaluate the human-level performances in both narrow and unrestricted settings.”

Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence QuotesCognitive Science
Book:Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds
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“This collection consists of the following pieces: COGNITIVE SCIENCE 1. The Embodied Cognition View 2. On Flanagan's Ideas On Dreams and Ahead: An Attempt To Locate Dreaming Phenomenon Under The Superclass Of Consciousness 3. "The Pragmatics of Cartoons: The Interaction of Bystander Humorosity vs. Agent-Patient Humorosity." 4. Integrationist School or on 'Rethinking Language'. 5. On Steven Pinker's 'Language Instinct' or Some Remarks on Evolutionary Psycholinguistics 6. On the (Im)Possibility of Psychotherapist Computer Programs: An Investigation within the Realm of Epistemology 7. Thai Language: A Brief Typology. ART NARRATIVES 8. Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan's Stories from the Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry. 9. A Critique of The Stories By South East Asian Writing Awardees 10. Mulholland Drive: Another impasse for the American film industry. 11. On 'About Schmidt' 12. On Black spirituals. 13. The possibility of an African American poetry.”

ArtCognitionCognitive Science
Book:Cognition And Art: Essays On Cognitive Science And Art Narratives
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“Пинтупи (одно из племен австралийских аборигенов) считают способность думать ключем к взрослению и к выходу из дикой эмоциональности, а "думать", "понимать" и "слышать" - это один и тот же глагол kulininpa, который буквально значит именно "слышать", и потому местом мышления считается ухо - в отличие от чувства, чье место в желудке.”

Cognitive Science
Book:История эмоций
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“The I-PFC extends between the longitudinal cerebral fissure that divides the two cerebral hemispheres and the lateral fissure below. This region receives processed multimodal information and has been described as a place "where past and future meet" by associating memories from the past with future actions.”

MemoryNeuroscienceCognitive ScienceAndreas NiederNumerical ProcessingBtain
Book:A Brain for Numbers: The Biology of the Number Instinct
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“Imaginistic rituals, especially more severe types involving high stress, trauma, or other forms of shared intense emotion, can lead to identity fusion. Identity fusion is a visceral sense of -oneness- with other group members where acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of the group are not uncommon. Imaginistic rituals tend to be more frequent among smaller, more closely-knit groups where a strong sense of unity is necessary to accomplish challenging goals (for example, sports teams, Nay Seals, subversive political movements, etc.).”

ReligionIdentityRitualCognitive ScienceDurkheim
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“The incompleteness of our knowledge is often addressed with different extrapolations and assumptions, sacrificing precision for ease, and reflecting the self onto the world. This is not always bad, but it can – easily – become tricky.”

ThinkingCreativityCognitionCognitive ScienceApproximate Thinking
Book:Fuzzy on the Dark Side: Approximate Thinking, and How the Mists of Creativity and Progress Can Become a Prison of Illusion
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“People are Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs) of their actions [and previous selves], with a varying number of data points. You(Today) = Acts(Today)*a + You(Yesterday)*b You are an expanding fuzzy network!”

Cognitive ScienceNetworksRecursionApproximate Thinking
Book:Fuzzy on the Dark Side: Approximate Thinking, and How the Mists of Creativity and Progress Can Become a Prison of Illusion
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“[O]ur brains try to predict the patterns that serve our needs and that fit our action repertoires. This may well result in the use of simple models whose power resides precisely in their failing to encode every detail and nuance present in the sensory array. This is not a barrier to true contact with the world - rather, it's a prerequisite for it. For knowing the world, in the only sense that can matter to an evolved organism, means being able to act in that world: being able to respond quickly and efficiently to salient environmental opportunities.”

Cognitive ScienceEmbodied CognitionActive InferenceEcological PsychologyEnactivismPredictive ProcessingSurfing Uncertainty
Author:Andy Clark
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“The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. How perfect? I will tell you. At first they did not yet know that there were things. This is the most perfect knowledge; nothing can be added. Next they knew things but did not yet make distinctions between them. Next they made distinctions between them but did not yet pass judgements upon them. When judgement was passed, Tao was destroyed. With the destruction of Tao, individual preferences come into being.”

SpiritualityEnlightenmentMysticismCognitive ScienceAncientsPre Agriculture
Book:The Tao Is Silent: A Whimsical and Sophisticated Guide to Eastern Philosophy and Inner Serenity
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“I'm not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn't necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one's own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn't care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about.”

EducationLearningTeachingCognitive ScienceSocratic Method
Author:Roger Schank
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“Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step further, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc'd to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.”

EvolutionMentalEvolutionary PsychologyCognitive Science
Book:A Treatise of Human Nature
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“Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.”

ConsciousnessWisdom QuotesGod QuotesMysticismScience And ReligionNeuroscienceKingdom Of GodPhilosophy Of ScienceNeuropsychologyNeurotheologyPathologyCognitive ScienceEpilepsyNeurological DisorderJoan Of ArcScience And Religion QuotesJoan Of Arc The Mystic Legacy
Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
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