Cognitive Quotes - Page 3

• When speaking of a "body of knowledge" or of "the results of research," e.g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.

  Leo Strauss

  Discovery, Effort, Special

  Leo Strauss (1959). “What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies”, p.77, University of Chicago Press

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• Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

  Ilana Mercer

  Party, Writing, Thinking

  "National Review Eunuchs". www.wnd.com. April 12, 2012.

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• Some international relations scholars would posit that interest in zombies is an indirect attempt to get a cognitive grip on what U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the "unknown knowns" in international security. Perhaps, however, there also exists a genuine but publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from the grave and feasting upon the entrails of the living.

  Daniel Drezner

  Zombie, Defense, Rising

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• There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ' holistic ' views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain... there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment.

  Francisco Varela

  Strong, Loss, Views

  "From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela's exploration of the biophysics of being" by D. Rudrauf, Biol Res 36: 27-65, 2003.

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• I'm a biologist who has been interested in the biological roots of cognitive phenomena.

  Francisco Varela

  Roots, Biologist, Has Beens

  "From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela's exploration of the biophysics of being" by D. Rudrauf, Biol Res 36: 27-65, 2003.

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

  Edward Tufte

  Nature, Thinking, Law

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• One of the most difficult problems of our age is that leaders, and perhaps academics as well, cannot readily admit that things are out of control and that we do not know what to do. We have too much information, limited cognitive abilities to think in systemic terms and an unwillingness to appear to be in control and to have solutions for our problems. We are afraid that if we admit to our confusion, we will make our followers and students anxious and disillusioned. We know we must learn how to learn, but we are afraid to admit it.

  Donald Michael Kraig

  Learning, Thinking, Confusion

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• In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Awards, Rocks

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• Society needs people who...know how to be compassionate and honest...Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone.

  Alvin Toffler

  Running, Emotional, Data

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• Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.

  Daniel Goleman

  Self, Attention, Digital

  "Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence". Book by Daniel Goleman, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 8, 2013.

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• Cognitive states of mind are seldom addictive, since they depend upon exploration of the world, and the individual encounter with the individual object, whose appeal is outside the subject's control. Addiction arises when the subject has full control over a pleasure and can ponder it at will. It is primarily a matter of sensory pleasure, and involves a kind of short-circuiting of the pleasure network. Addiction is characterized by a loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively creative life.

  Roger Scruton

  Loss, Emotional, Addiction

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• We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.

  John Marshall Harlan II

  Often Is, Views, Justice

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• We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

  Steven Pinker

  Violence, World, Violent

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• Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.

  Moby

  Fall, Looks, World

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• If we take two people who have exactly the same sort of lesion or area of damage in the brain and then we do cognitive tests on them, you know, one person might have a very severe deficit in a certain area of thinking and another person might not with the same exact lesion. So there is a lot of differences and you can't just look at one brain and understand the whole picture.

  H. A. Berlin

  Thinking, Two, Differences

  "Heather Berlin on the Link Between Genius and Disorder". bigthink.com.

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• Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.

  Steven Pinker

  Philosophical, Angel, Mind

  "How the Mind Works". Book by Steven Pinker, 1997.

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• What is true for the emotions may also be true for the intellect. Some of our perplexities may come from a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today.

  Steven Pinker

  Purpose, May, Today

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.295, Penguin

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• It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about.

  Megan McArdle

  Mistake, People, Care

  "Egotistical bias". www.theatlantic.com. June 12, 2008.

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• Mood reflects the biology of the brain. How you feel is affected by the chemicals in the brain, and these are the same chemicals that form the basis of mood-altering drugs. You may use yoga, meditation, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) or exercise to alter your mood, or revert to healthy eating, regular exercise and getting enough sleep.

  Liz Miller

  Yoga, Sleep, Exercise

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• Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains our minds to think critically and to question what you are told. This is why dictators censor or ban books. It's why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. It's why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces when they walk to school.

  Karin Slaughter

  Girl, Country, Book

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• As an artist, where do you conjure these concepts? They come through you instead of through cognitive thought.

  Nick Littlemore

  Artist, Concepts

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• Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes.

  Henry Mintzberg

  Sophisticated, Strategy, Social

  Henry Mintzberg (2013). “Strategy Bites Back ePub eBook”, p.74, Pearson UK

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• Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

  Ayn Rand

  Reality, Order, Giving

  Ayn Rand (1984). “Philosophy: Who Needs It”, p.25, Penguin

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• We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data - the lowest cognitive form - has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.

  Dee Hock

  Struggle, Data, Understanding

  Dee Hock, VISA International (1999). “Birth of the Chaordic Age”, p.224, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

  John Searle

  Umpires, Car, Understanding

  "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.

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