#cognitive

There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#always #been #believe #cannot #cognitive

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

— Edward Tufte

#cognitive #laws #nature #part #particular

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#hallucinations #music #musical-hallucinations #neuroscience #psychology

Global warming is by its very nature a threat, but it is a deadly threat only because it fails to trigger the brain's alarm. It leaves us sleeping in a burning bed. ↗

— Dan Gilbert

#climate-messaging #cognitive-functioning #dan-gilbert #global-warming #change

Just as we may, through an appalled realization that we were unaware of what was going on in the mind of one we thought we knew, come to wonder how we ever know what another person is thinking or feeling, so too we may, having on some occasion wanted badly to understand and having clearly failed, come to wonder how we ever manage to understand, and how we know that we have succeeded. ↗

— Patrick Wilson

#communication #connections #inquiry #libraries #understanding

Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public. ↗

— Clay Shirky

#movies

If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most. ↗

— Penn Jillette

#critical-thinking #faith #reason #religion #faith

Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlour game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#hypocrisy #politics #family

The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning. ↗

— Rodolfo R. Llinás

#cognitive-psychology #creativity #neuroscience #psychology #science

Children discover and verify their theories in quite the same way that scientists do: through experimentation. They manipulate the world and discover regularities of causation from those manipulations. Why do they do it? The discovery of regularities comes with a pleasurable burst of insight, which all of us, but especially children and scientists, continuously long for like bonbons or opium. ↗

— Matthew M. Hurley Daniel C. Dennet Reginald B. Adams

#discovery #science #science