Mental Representations Quotes

You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models.

The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux, and incomprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a scheme in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another.

If you look at all the notions we accept about who we are, you find that they are all based upon our perceptual experiences.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.

Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.

Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

What is consciousness? Our brain simulates reality. So, our everyday experiences are a form of dreaming, which is to say, they are mental models, simulations, not the things they appear to be.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

In pursuing my fervent goal of relating external stimuli to reports about internal-neural change, we were, paradoxically enough, following the most orthodox tradition in psychology.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses - our reality-tunnels - will become.

The neural code usually refers to how your current thoughts and feelings and perceptions are encoded in the signals that neurons are passing around - and it's not the same. The code is not the same for every person.

I'd even say it's a realistic film because that's the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea.

Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist.

For psychological purposes the most important differences in conation are those in virtue of which the object is revealed as sensed or perceived or imaged or remembered or thought.

Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain.

Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.

Our relationship to reality and to our experience is all based upon the ideas in our mind that we're always trying to live up to.