Cognitive Association Quotes

Every new experience will trigger melodies in my head.

Normally, people believe that, if they hear just words, that these words must lead to some thought.

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

When I write a note, it sticks in my head differently.

names are a way to keep people in your mind

You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device, and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and, only when you're sleepy, return to the bed.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

Feelings are memories. Memories are also feelings.

Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, where the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together.

I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.

When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?

The word book acted as a transient stimulus

All thought is a feat of association; having what's in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn't know you knew

A riff can take on the aspect of a chorus in a listener's psyche.

If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.

Sometimes I have something stuck in my head and that directs the rhyme that I'm writing with.

Sometimes music comes across to me just when I am sitting around doing nothing, and then the music makes me think of a few words I might have written.

The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.