Cognitive Pleasure Quotes

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Discourse, the sweeter banquet of the mind.

They enjoy thinking. They enjoy being creative. They enjoy having ideas. Most people do not enjoy thinking at all.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

Consider a cow. A cow doesn't have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain's ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.

I get a fizzy thing in my brain, like a nice glass of wine, and I want to know facts and I want to understand.

You want your mind to be boggled. That is a pleasure in and of itself. And it's more a pleasure if it's boggled by something that you can then demonstrate is really, really true.

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

There's a good case to be made that having fun is a key evolutionary advantage right next to opposable thumbs in terms of importance. Without that little chemical twist in our brains that makes us enjoy learning new things, we might be more like the sharks and ants of the world.

It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.