{"quotes":[{"text":"In every walk of life, you do have the freedom to choose, but that freedom is based on the perception of the world and yourself which you have gained until that moment of life.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["cognition","cognitive-science","consciousness","decision","decision","experience","free-will","free-will","neuroscience","neuroscience-of-free-will","perception-of-reality","reality"],"id":1065,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"},{"text":"You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.","author":"Andrew Solomon","tags":["breakdown","cognition","depression","future","issues","judgment","present","troubles"],"id":2333,"author_id":"Andrew+Solomon"},{"text":"There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition itself. Nevertheless, motives like wanting to find the truth, not wanting to be mistaken, etc., tend to align with epistemic goals in a way that many other commitments do not. As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hue to a positive state of mind, to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt for instance. This is precisely what we mean by phrases like 'wishful thinking', and 'self-deception'. Such a person will of necessity be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out non-epistemic motives in an others view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt on a persons connection to the world as it is.","author":"Sam Harris","tags":["cognition","emotion","morality","motivation","religion"],"id":3167,"author_id":"Sam+Harris"},{"text":"Another big group of dolphins had just surfaced alongside our moving vessel—leaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squeally, whistly way, with many babies swift alongside their mothers. And this time, confined to just the surface of such deep and lovely lives, I was becoming unsatisfied. I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so—close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that was forbidden fruit: Who are you? Science usually steers firmly from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind—if there is such—is unknowable. Permissible questions are “it” questions: where it lives; what it eats; what it does when danger threatens; how it breeds. But always forbidden—always forbidden—is the one question that might open the door: “Who?” — Carl Safina.","author":"Carl Safina","tags":["animals","cognition","conservation","emotion","science","thinking","thinking-outside-the-box"],"id":5837,"author_id":"Carl+Safina"},{"text":"I treat my thoughts like an old person treats their valuables: I cannot for the life of me proceed to throwing them out.","author":"Criss Jami","tags":["artist","belief","brain","cognition","confession","consideration","creativity","creed","death","discard","funny","funny-but-true","habits","honesty","humor","instinct","intellectual","intuition","irrational","knowledge","life","logic","mind","negativity","old-habits","old-person","opinion","original-thought","positivity","precious","psychology","rational","rationalization","sentimental","stubborn","think","thinker","thinking","thought","thoughts","tradition","treasure","valuable","wisdom"],"id":6887,"author_id":"Criss+Jami"},{"text":"Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.","author":"Orson Scott Card","tags":["cognition","difficulty","growing-up","science-fiction"],"id":21474,"author_id":"Orson+Scott+Card"},{"text":"Cognition can happen in many different ways and combinations.","author":"Pearl Zhu","tags":["cognition","thinking"],"id":34640,"author_id":"Pearl+Zhu"},{"text":"Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.","author":"Max Tegmark","tags":["cognition","evolution","intuition","mind","science"],"id":36574,"author_id":"Max+Tegmark"},{"text":"Internalizing problem-solving techniques enhances the neural activity that allows you to more easily hear the whispers of your growing intuition. When you know—really know—how to solve a problem just by looking at it, you’ve created a commanding chunk that sweeps like a song through your mind.","author":"Barbara Oakley","tags":["cognition","intuition","learning"],"id":42202,"author_id":"Barbara+Oakley"},{"text":"To be naive is to be unaware of how stupid and cruel other people are; but, by some definitions, ignorance is nearly the opposite of naivety in being a kind of cynicism, in being unaware of their intelligence and humanity. It seems to be a normal although unfortunate case that the great many of us consciously abhor ignorance in others yet subconsciously practice it ourselves: as naivety is apparent and well-known to inflict its damage upon oneself; whereas the alternative and the easier, ignorance, its damage upon others.","author":"Criss Jami","tags":["abhorrence","awareness","balance","brain","cognition","conscious","cruelty","cynicism","damage","discernment","distrust","foolishness","harm","hatred","humanity","hypocrisy","ignorance","intelligence","judging-people","judgment","naivety","psychology","selfishness","selfishness-judging-people","stupidity","subconscious","trust","unawareness","unconscious"],"id":56516,"author_id":"Criss+Jami"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":84,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}