Cognitive Analysis Quotes

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

I think I tend to live in sort of a meta state of existence where I'm always analyzing and analyzing whatever I'm going through at any given moment, and a lot of times I'll reflect back on and go, 'Oh look at that - if I acted this way when that happened, I might not have thought of that that way.'

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.

I think anybody who's curious about anything, including their own mind, is inherently a skeptic.

If I throw you into an MRI machine right now, I can tell you what words you're about to say.

I'm usually very analytical when I'm prepping stuff: real into the head thing.

To reflect is to disturb one's thoughts.

I always felt that the most common thread in my life from when I was young until now has been a highly observant, very analytical mind.

At the breakfast table we are footnoting everything that we read. We don't recognise it as such but we encounter an article in the newspaper and then suddenly we recall that a friend had a certain comment on that particular story, a certain bit of news that we saw on the television applies to that and we immediately assemble an idea of a story.

I'm not much of an analyzer or a psychologist.

The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.

I'm interested in getting deep into a person's consciousness and doing so in ways in which the narrator is secondary to the character's own thoughts.

The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.

Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

My whole career I've been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork.

I don't like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.

I'm a prolific overanalyzer. And I can always use 15 words in place of three 3, no matter what.

The only way to study the mind is to get at facts, and then intellect will arrange them and deduce the principles.

The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.

The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.