Cognitive Science Quotes

Cognitive control is not just about suppressing impulses, but about flexibly directing attention to achieve goals.

Language is not merely a tool for communication; it is the very fabric of thought itself.

The central claim of the computational theory of mind is that thinking is a form of computation.

The brain is not a computer. It is a memory system that learns by making predictions.

The world is its own best model.

The mind is not a passive receiver of information but an active constructor of its own reality.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience.

Consciousness is integrated information.

Consciousness is a property of complex systems that have a certain kind of causal structure.

We are all hallucinating all the time; it's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality.

The brain is an inference engine. It's constantly trying to predict what's going to happen next.

London taxi drivers, with their extensive spatial knowledge, provide a unique window into the plasticity of the human brain.

Memory is not a unitary faculty of the mind, but rather a collection of interacting systems, each with its own characteristics and functions.

Attention is a system of brain networks that allows us to select and process information, and to prepare for action.

The problem of meaning is not just a problem for philosophy; it's a problem for cognitive science.

Metaphor is not just a figure of speech. It is a mode of thought.

The two main things that we want to do with data are to predict and to decide. Prediction is a statistical problem. Decision is a causal problem.

The biggest problem with AI is that it's not intelligent enough yet.

To understand a sentence, you have to understand the meaning of the words, but you also have to understand the meaning of the structure.

A computational theory is an abstract formulation of the problem that the system is trying to solve, and why it is trying to solve it.