Mind Function Quotes

The mind is like a parachute. In order to function, it first has to open.

We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.

The human mind is an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods.

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.

This is the way the mind functions: its whole interest is in that which you have not got.

The mind does different things in performance, and conscious thought sometimes takes a backseat.

The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.