Susan Blackmore Quotes

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.

Concepts are mental images.

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Our relationship to reality and to our experience is all based upon the ideas in our mind that we're always trying to live up to.

Man is a recording animal.

It is what men think that determines how they act

The way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel determines how you act.

Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.

WHAT a person thinks is determined by HOW a person thinks.

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid , uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

By the way that we think and by the way that we believe in things, in that way our world is created.

I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.