Cognitive Capacity Quotes

Fish aren't smart. It's not like they have advanced degrees.

I think the power of the mind is amazing, and we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do.

When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.

Remember that we can only in our forebrains handle 5-7 items. Our backbrains can handle massive amounts. So when you're given a problem, think about it before you go sleep, and chances are you can solve it by the next morning.

People around the NBA really think that I'm dumb or stupid. But people that know me know that I'm actually very intelligent.

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

Concentration is the root of all the higher abilities in man.

It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.

We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.

Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.

Sure, our three-pound brains might be inadequate to understand the universe. But perhaps they're just good enough to build something that can.

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.

The less you know, the more I comprehend. You don't have to drag me down, I descend.

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.

Just as a man working with his tools should know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know its limitations.

To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.

The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

I have an IQ of about 160, I taught science for about fifteen years.

Part of knowing how to think is knowing how the laws of nature shape the world around us. Without that knowledge, without that capacity to think, you can easily become a victim of people who seek to take advantage of you.

Minds are of three kinds: one is capable of thinking for itself; another is able to understand the thinking of others; and a third can neither think for itself nor understand the thinking of others. The first is of the highest excellence, the second is excellent, and the third is worthless.

It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.