Mental Processes Quotes

It is not merely that Johnny can't read, or even that Johnny can't think. Johnny doesn't know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling. … The phrase ‘I feel’ is often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term…

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

The brain runs its show incognito.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

On the basis of research in several disciplines, including the study of how human capacities are represented in the brain, I developed the idea that each of us has a number of relatively independent mental faculties, which can be termed our 'multiple intelligences.'

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

Personally, I’ve gotten so that I now use a kind of two-track analysis. First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered? And second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain at a subconscious level is automatically conclusions in various ways — which, by and large, are useful — but which often malfunction? One approach is rationality… And the other is to evaluate the psychological factors that cause subconscious conclusions — many of which are wrong.

Most of my work is in my mind.

The computer is not, in our opinion, a good model of the mind, but it is as the trumpet is to the orchestra - you really need it. And so, we have very massive simulations in computers because the problem is, of course, very complex.

The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make' the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.

The mind is not sex-typed.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

I feel, I think, I judge; therefore, a part of organized matter like me is capable of feeling, thinking, and judging.

I'm more cerebral than I want to be.

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

Your brain does not manufacture thoughts. Your thoughts shape neural networks.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man's mind.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

There's a lot of sub-conscious stuff you may write but you don't then suddenly sit down and take out your analytical books and say: I'm determined to find out where this came from. You'd probably be wrong anyway.

The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart.

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.