Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

Remember that we can only in our forebrains handle 5-7 items. Our backbrains can handle massive amounts. So when you're given a problem, think about it before you go sleep, and chances are you can solve it by the next morning.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

I have files, I have computer files and, you know, files on paper. But most of it is really in my head. So God help me if anything ever happens to my head!

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged "typical instance.

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

My brain is like a hard drive. Once you start adding new information, you start cutting off old information.

One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

I don't really like filling my brain with a lot of stuff.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

Attention for children is so much about input, and the brain can only filter so much - I don't know how many millions of messages that come through the brain, and we can only filter so much through it.

From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

President Reagan doesn't retain very much of what comes his way on a given day.

I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand. I think if I didn't have a computer, I just couldn't do it. Maybe it's a brain-section issue.

We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.

I think the problem we have as apes is we're asking far bigger questions than we could possibly process.

I believe all of us only use one tenth of our brain. I know people who use one per cent only!

The brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard.

Read, but not to remember everything. Read because that 1% that you remember has the potential to change your life.