Cognitive Adaptability Quotes

We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.

I am mentally bifocal.

A stubborn mind conduces as little to wisdom or even to knowledge, as a stubborn temper to happiness

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.

People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.

Human brains - in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness - are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the Stone Age. They are not evolving with the pace of change.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.

The only way to learn is by changing your mind.

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.

Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.

The brain has a quality referred to as plasticity. The ability to form new neural pathways even into very old age. The brain is fluid, flexible and incredibly adaptable to new experiences.

All evidence indicates that the neuron does not reset. The synapses do not reset. They are always different. They're changing every millisecond. Your brain today is very, very different from what it was when you were 10 years old, and yet you may have profound memories from when you were 10.

A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

Does your mind feel more and more like teflon? Nothing sticks to it?

The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

I don't feel old, except in the morning once in a while, when I can't turn over properly and say, "What's that? When did that happen?" Our brain doesn't accept that. We're geared to last.

How much you discipline your mind to step out of its routines and look into new ways of doing things that you haven't yet adopted, is what will determine your economic potential.

Thoughts can be revised. Deeds cannot.

The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.

The heart yields spontaneity; the mind bends to understanding.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

There are two types of mind . . . the mathematical, and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves.