Cognitive Processing Quotes

My mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.

My mind is a chest of drawers. When I wish to deal with a subject, I shut all the drawers but the one in which the subject is to be found. When I am wearied, I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.

No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

I was obsessive-compulsive, and I probably had a little splash of Asperger's in there, but in those days, in 1953, you were just a difficult kid. Attention deficit didn't even exist back then. I really had trouble completing tasks - I couldn't sit still.

A reader does not suddenly comprehend what is being read or studied, in a snap, miraculously. Comprehension needs to be worked forged, by those who read and study; as subjects of the action, they must seek to employ appropriate instruments in order to carry out the task. For this very reason, reading and studying form a challenging task, one requiring patience and perseverance.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

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

At times I think and at times I am.

At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

Learn it all, then forget it all.

The average voter has to hear a point seven times before it registers.

A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.

Reading makes me so sleepy. Honestly, I'm a visual learner.

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.

If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

When you look at a wall spotted with stains...you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautiful with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees. Or again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn figures.