Best Cognitive Science Quotes

"Everything that we know, everything we can do, and our true potential is set by the limits of neuroplasticity."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"It is the greatest driver of human empathy to learn how our minds work."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"I care about reducing human suffering. And then I meet someone who I think is pro a policy that promotes human suffering. And of course, the visceral human instinct is like, to hell with you and your viewpoint, this is horrible, this is intolerable. But because I have this cognitive science hat on. It allows me to walk around with a slightly different viewpoint."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"These short periods of rest, these 10-second rest periods, the hippocampus and the cortex are active in ways such that you get a 20 times repeat of the practice. It's a temporal compression."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"But where we tend to be more relaxed, and we tend to be almost in a kind of sleepy mode... that's when we tend to be better at novel configurations of existing elements, which is creativity."

"Music, no less than language, is a defining trait of our species, universal to human beings and unique to human minds."

"It's the ability of the brain to change itself - to rewire."

Don Vaughn

"Neuroplasticity...it's not just random, it is intelligently plastic."

Don Vaughn

"The discovery that the brain is not fixed, it's not like a hardwired machine but the way it works is by changing its wiring."

"The most exciting thing is somewhere in the interface between cognitive science, neuroscience, AI, computer science, and philosophy of mind."

"So why is it that some memories last our entire lives, whereas other memories, we hear and they're fleeting?"

"His mind is amazing; he's a preeminent conversational cognitive scientist in, I think, the world."

"The way the brain works alters based on how we put our attention."

"Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain follows."

"If attention is indeed the case that our attention is the brain's boss, is it a good boss?"

"Salience is a huge concept in human existence."

"Belief is a kind of extension of the self. When you believe a proposition, when someone says something and you think, 'Yeah that's true', you are in some sense taking it in hand as part of your cognitive emotional repertoire."

"The ability for the brain to engage in its external environment and take reads of its internal environment was very valuable in allowing people to engage this thing that psychologically we describe as tenacity and willpower."

"Your brain is creating a simulation for you through which you interact with the world."

"It's kind of surprising that this one learning mechanism accounts for most of our intelligence."

"A strange loop is a paradoxical sort of circular hierarchy. It's when a symbol becomes self-reflexive and it points back at itself. This leads to all sorts of interesting paradoxes and it really stretches the imagination, bends the mind."

"You see, Hofstadter is saying that there are two real main strange loops... one is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem... And then there is the self. You and me. I and my. Hofstadter argues that the self is a complex set of symbols which twists back on themselves, generating themselves from scratch, so to speak."

"Trying to understand mathematically how the human mind works using big data."

"According to cognitive scientists, humans are born believers."

"Your thoughts create your brain. The process of thinking itself is creating your brain."

"Everything just boils down to neurons in your head, and you have those neurons. You just have to try."

"It's actually the question of relevance, and there's a whole branch of cognitive science now focusing on how in the world do you decide what you attend to when there's an almost infinite number of things to attend to."

"What we see is purely a result of our brains interpreting the information being received and often it isn't a true reflection of reality."

"Our brains don't just show us the image that exactly replicates what our eyes are perceiving but it uses contextual analysis and previously gained knowledge to make adjustments too."

"The problem with memory with ADHD is not with long-term storage memory. It's with short-term working memory."

"This experiment shows that contrary to popular belief, it is possible to communicate with dreaming people."

"The human brain is hardwired to detect patterns."

"The brain has a great degree of what's called plasticity."

"The computations going on in our brains and the computations going on in these simple cellular automata are essentially equivalent."

"If these equations are things that come out of this gloppy gray three pounds structure sitting inside this thing that sits upon our shoulders, how wondrous."

"Studying code cognition can give us clues to how the brain repurposes its circuitry to process weird, novel things that it's never seen before."

"The phenomenal self-model is that part of the mental self-model which is currently embedded into the highest-order integrated structure, the global model of the world."

"The human brain is the most powerful structure known to humankind, and it was designed to learn."

"The more frequently you check in with yourself and become non-judgmentally aware of the moment, the more frequently you will be using your executive control network, which deactivates your default mode network."

"If we recognize that we are conscious about this, then therefore we can make adjustments."

"The brain is a good place to start looking at this."

"Personally I think that science will one day give us not just a very satisfactory description of our physical world but even of how it is that our brains give us this need for religious belief."

"ADHD disrupts the executive system, causing severe time blindness."

"When we talk about memory what we're really talking about is how your immediate experiences relate to previous and future experiences."

"Humans are basically pattern detection machines."

"The best cameraman in the world is no match for the human brain."

"A little bit of understanding in certain circumstances can defeat what a very, very powerful computer can do."

"Your language influences the way you think about the world."

"You are the best equipped person in all the world to program your own brain."

"Consciousness takes a lot of brain power. It burns up a lot of energy. Your brain uses eighty percent of the available blood sugar in your bloodstream anytime you're consciously engaged or cognitively engaged."

"Artificial intelligence will teach us a lot about what consciousness actually is."

"These self hotspots become cooler when attentiveness is required and demanded by events in the external environment."

"Useful delusions: the power and paradox of the self-deceiving brain."

"What we do know is that certain areas of the brain are responsible for our perception of the world and how we interact with it."

"Human memory isn't a linear contrapositive function. Just because you remember one thing does not mean you remember something else; it quite literally doesn't work that way."

"The big message from this last part besides hemispheric specialization is that your brain is a society of semi-independent brains doing their own thing, sharing information as needed."

"According to this idea of dolphin intelligence, they are on the same level of intelligence as humans."

"Our memories are extremely fallible, and understanding more about exactly how fallible they are is vitally important."

"Researchers are pushing the boundaries about what they understand about animal intelligence."

"Is it possible that what we see isn't what it actually is, and that our brains are interpreting it?"

"We're never going to understand human intelligence until we can understand that."

"Analogies help us understand and predict the world around us."

"Beliefs are like little viruses, they eat only one kind of food: evidence."

"Petty use of cognitive science can lead to death."

"Grid cells and place cells seem to be a key part of the machinery behind your sense of your surrounding space."

"Chimpanzees displayed a recall ability similar to that of a photographic memory."

"The mind is the first thing the gut is the first brain."

"The brain is only as interesting as the mind and of course it is like psychedelics are only worth studying in terms of their brain effects because their psychological effects are so damn stunning."

"The brain really doesn't differentiate between stories that are real or fictional."

"You need a different way of thinking, a new perspective in a sense, and that's provided here by the diffuse mode."

"Building AI helps us understand the mysteries of our own minds."

"Our brains are neural nets... Everything shapes the way you see the world."

"Different visual neurons have different receptive fields for different parts of space."

"We're approaching modern problems with a stone-age brain."

"It's very possible that animals that show this kind of different kind of intelligence can be intelligent in a way that we don't expect them to be."

"So as you work on the cognitive aspect of uh of these robots do you think we'll ever get to human level or superhuman level intelligence."

"The speed of your thoughts correlates with the speed of your exhalation."

"You get two people that are one is a trained Observer and the other is not they're going to come to very different conclusions."

"The essence of pinkness is reproduced in our brains."

"Their approach is to look at the brain as a computer and pretend the problem of consciousness that we're discussing doesn't exist whatsoever."

"Recognition comes from the incredible amount of highly structured information stored in long-term memory."

"The brain is constantly having to process tons of information. So it is always looking for shortcuts."

"Plasticity of plasticity: mental training improves engagement with neuroplasticity over time."

"Language goes from being heard to being seen without ever crossing over a quantized moment of transition."

"Birds recognize, remember, and use familiar landmarks to orientate."

"Mass formation psychosis, whatever you want to call it, it does exist and it's demonstrable. You don't have to believe it exists, you can know that it exists."

"We don't understand how our own intelligence works."

"Methylene blue eliminates negative associations and retains positive aspects of memory."

"Methylene blue enhances memory and the retention of fear extinction."

"In some sense, we're remembering more about the prefix."

"Prosody really does make a difference in helping babies pay more attention to parental speech."

"Your thoughts are in the brain that your brain thinks."

"Whole brain thinking surpasses left brain thinking or right brain thinking."

"Large language models do have pragmatically speaking theory of mind, and they have absorbed all the lessons available from the internet about how to understand people's beliefs and desires."

"The most intelligent and efficient form of thinking is non-thinking."

"I think memory is like that. It's like everything's connected, you know."

"Even if we see the same information, our prior expectations about how the world operates are going to change our conclusions."

"Your experience changes radically and the things that we would take for granted as just being reflections of reality are revealed to be constructions of the brain."

"Your working memory is partly responsible for your entire richness of experience."

"Isn't it crazy that the brain is the only thing that's ever named itself? Crazy stuff, man."

"To observe the brain perceiving and thinking, whether sensing the exterior world or imagining in the interior mind, is to marvel at the mechanisms of awareness."

"The mind is such a powerful tool... we still don't know what it's about, how it functions."

"The purpose of learning how your mind works is to help you learn more efficiently, decreasing the time it takes to get you to that skill level."

"Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's?"

"You cannot replace a human mind anytime soon."

"We're always looking for shortcuts; the Mozart Effect was a shortcut to intelligence."

"Even when we correctly rely on our memories, they can be highly inaccurate or outright false."

"Minds constrain possibility space to achieve functional outcomes."

"Strange loops are so incredibly profound, you don't even understand how profound a strange loop is."

"Sentience is just a weird word because you know you could argue that an insect has sentience."

"Everything about your experience, thoughts, or memories is all in your brain and represented in the firing statistics of action potentials."

"Your brain is a super computer and your self-talk as a program will run."

"It's just you not doing what everyone else is doing."

"If you give people the intuitive feeling for anything... I think it's pretty close to sufficient."

"It reaffirms something that anthropologists have long thought: it's not how big a brain is, but rather how it is organized."

"False memory is the idea that entire memories or elements of memories can be entirely false."

"Cognitive science is turning to the topic of wisdom itself."

"We can physically change our brain by using our mind."

"The brain is changing all the time, with everything we think, with everything we experience."

"Barbara Oakley's two main modes of functioning... diffuse mode and focus mode..."

"Essentially forgetting is a crucial part of the learning process, much like rest is a crucial counterpart to strength training if you wanna get physically stronger."

"You can change the wiring in your brain by changing how you think."

"We think with our bodies as much as with our minds."

"How lazy and easy to manipulate our brains actually are."

"What we need to know to even address this mystery is...how minds are put together in the brain."

"Memory is fundamentally a feedback mechanism."

"The brain changes its physical configuration in response to the tasks you give it and the stimuli you expose it to."

"Your brain doesn't necessarily reshape itself like clay, it simply finds new ways to connect the dots."

"It's not about learning how to manifest, it's about updating the software in the hardware of your brain."

"The capability for syntactic language makes us significantly unique."

"Attention is really about selection, and that selection process happens through two main forces: top down and bottom up."

"The contemplation process is the building process neurologically."

"The mind is a muscle we use every single day."

"It's thought to be one of the most widely studied areas of the brain and has great implications for learning and memory."

"I'm Dan Dennett. I'm a philosopher. I'm interested in how the mind works."

"Understanding consciousness goes beyond what computational theory of mind offers."

"At each stage in sensory processing, there's a partial processing and a partial solution sent back to the earlier stage to bias the processing."

"The brain is a prediction machine, combining ambiguous sensory input with prior expectations to form its best guess of what's out there."

"Only by understanding the cognitive forces that govern religious development can we ever hope to cure humanity of the superstitions that have plagued our minds since the dawn of civilization."

"There's a direct relationship between what we perceive and what's going on in the brain."

"Could indicate a shift in our normal brain wave frequencies... also a shift in our Consciousness."

"Headcanon alert: the primordial mind was much like a human mind."

"Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows."

"The verbal left brain created a coherent story."

"One of the royal avenues to knowledge, especially if you're talking about the mind, is introspection."

"The brain is an integrated system that pulls together abilities that you use in Tandem."

"Looking up is a very, very strong sign that you're remembering something."

"Your whole perceptual world is built out of cells that are just trying to do the best job they can."

"Our memory is really good at storing spatial locations."

"This is one of those topics that the more I looked into it the more I researched it the more fascinating it became to me because memory is just so weird..."

"Our memories are dependent on small little markers in our environment."

"It's intelligence, it's learning the principles."

"Predictions instead of only going top-down and prediction errors going bottom-up, both can flow in both directions."

"One of the foremost thinkers of this Century, he revolutionized the study of language and of the human mind."

"The Chomskian revolution placed language study in a psychobiological setting and played a critical role in fueling the modern reemergence of the cognitive sciences."

"Learning about ego depletion and believing that willpower is a limited resource is an information hazard."

"Most of you, if you're somewhere between 18 and 25, you're at your peak memory capacity for the rest of your life."

"This has all the properties of memory. It's long-term stable, it's rewritable, it's got conditional recall, and it has two possible outcomes."

"As you change your mind or manage your mind, you will actually be changing your brain."

"Your brain is for having ideas, not for holding ideas."

"Thomas Lawson: Founder of the cognitive science of religion, on relating the artistic experience with the religious experience."

"The poverty of the stimulus argument has been completely empirically falsified."

"Cognitive science is taking the naturalistic imperative in cognitive science, it's how do we fit back into this world?"

"There is scientific research that shows that the different kinds of thinking really do exist."

"The N400 response is related to visual and auditory processing of language, and occurs when a subject experiences an unexpected ending to a sentence."

"Attention is not an unlimited resource."

"We've learned a lot in cognitive science about how the brain works."

"She is the incomparable Dr. Maya Shankar. She's a cognitive scientist. She was a senior advisor in the Obama White House. She founded and served as chair of the White House Behavioral Science Team."

"It's almost like a barrier there that they don't, in the brain, doesn't compute."

"The brain is more like a filter, a filtering function that consciousness."

"Every choice you make is using up some of your cognitive Reserve."

"Reflexive and cognitive empathy will never disappear, but emotional empathy will, because it's no longer needed. Even today, it's no longer needed."

"If mindfulness helps me remember lost perspectival knowing, and movement practices help me to remember participatory knowing, putting the two together would be optimal in mindful movement."

"Meaning has to do with what your brain is doing, that is, grammar is going to turn out that it has everything to do with how you understand things in the world with your brain."

"Building up spatial navigation... is deeply rooted in neuroscience and biology."

"Engaging with thinkers like those in cognitive science can bridge the gap between secular and religious cultures."

"Our perception and cognition are very active and structure a lot of what we do."

"During the last few decades, we've learned more and more about human cognitive architecture, how we learn, how we think, how we solve problems."

"...if you read like this whole thing you would have such a good grasp of the philosophy of mind it's really really good..."

"It's part of a larger effort in our lab for understanding the relationship between cognition and creativity."

"The brain is creating... an activity of brain circuits which has these extraordinary properties."

"Mental spaces theory and blending theory have had a transformational effect."

"Compression is also part of what is very, very distinctively human."

"What you can Define is you can Define this cognitive light cone as the spatial temporal size of the biggest goal that the system can pursue."

"We have ways of processing information that don't merely track formal properties."

"Emotion gets into our brain differently than information."

"We're all visual thinkers, which means that we have an innate ability to generate, store, retrieve, transform visual images and sensations."

"You recognize features because they're stored in your brain."

"Our brain is far more flexible than we give it credit for."

"The brain requires repetition but also requires novelty."

"The central challenge of science in the 21st century is to understand the human mind in biological terms."

"Not only does perceiving support action, but action also supports perceiving."

"There's something outside that's involved in our appreciation of mathematics."

"Cognitive load optimization... talks about the brain power that is required to learn something."

"It's a really special time, and we can look forward to doing an amazing thing, which is maybe understanding the way the mind works, the way intelligence works."

"It's a kind of learning that's specialized for general multi-step prediction which may be the key to perception, modeling the world, the meaning of our knowledge."

"People who are left-brained are more logical and analytical, whereas people who are right-brained are more creative and intuitive."

"Our brains are naturally inclined to learn language through listening."

"The magic number for short-term memory is seven plus or minus two."

"Cognitive development is simply the study of how we acquire the ability to learn, to think, to communicate, and to remember."