J. K. Rowling Quotes

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

I like that feeling in your brain when you've got seven things that you're holding in one moment-you heard that person cough, you heard that person laugh, you're also saying your line, you're also listening to the person who's talking to you.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Writing, for me, is an extension of thinking - it's my way of processing, and only when I've gotten something down on the page have I thought through it fully.

I read slowly, I watch movies slowly, because I retain everything.

But there are definitely times when I just need to write to clarify my thoughts and put any doubts to bed.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a "giant pattern detector." If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we use this energy. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how use it. And it is an energy under control, to do with as we please; hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

... he was juggling issues and solving problems, which was why his brain had no space left for memories.

Multitasking divides your attention and leads to confusion and weakened focus.

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.

I always say you can self-medicate through closet cleaning. Everyone knows that feeling of a clear surface, and how it makes you feel you can really focus and start your work.

The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.

Part of you just has to be in service of processing things and getting them out.

When you are relaxed, you can focus a lot more easily than when you are hyper and over-energetic. It's important to be "up" for a competition, but you shouldn't have too much energy, because you might not be able to control it. In competitions, it is important to be able to bring the power and energy you are feeling down to a level that you can control. This comes with practice and experience.

[Women] tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers.

I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.