Robin Marantz Henig Quotes

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

It is imperfection - not perfection - that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.

The human brain is built to compare; it's Darwinian to consider an alternative when one presents itself.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer.

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

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

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits, and the brain adapts to it.

Justin's real weakness is, he's very much in his head. He intellectualizes a lot.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

In my mind, the speed of the game is mental.

I'm very slow. I'm a slow learner.

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

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.

Women are in this respect more fortunate than men, that most of their employments are of such a nature that they can at the same time be thinking of quite different things.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.

Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. ... But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

[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.

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

What happens behind your eyes is more important than what happens in front of them. This is a reversal from the way that we have been taught and the way that we had experienced the world as five sensory humans.

Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the indiscriminate recording of detail.