Cognition Quotes

“Stressful conditions tax our cognitive bandwidth, reducing our ability to think clearly and exercise executive control. Stress also hurts our ability to make rational long-term decisions that require delayed gratification. Living in a community in which we feel a sense of trust and support acts as a buffer against the detrimental impact of scarcity. However, a higher level of income inequality in our community can fray our sense of social trust.”
― Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

“The grief triggered by the loss of loved ones does not appear to be an adaptation produced by natural selection as it does not appear to increase an individual's fitness in any way -at least not in non-social species. Depression caused by loss is more likely to be a by-product of the ability to form long-term attachment relationships. Grief is the price we have to pay when the attachment relationship is finally broken. This assumption is supported by the fact that a person may also experience symptoms of depression as a result of the death of their beloved dog, horse or other pet. The stronger the attachment, the longer the symptoms of depression last. On the other hand, the knowledge of the pain caused by the loss of an important person or pet makes us take more care of the people or pets that are important to us.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it's not fully online until people are in their midtwenties.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Societies with frequent anonymous interactions tend to outsource punishment to gods. In contrast, hunter-gatherers' gods are less likely than chance to care whether we've been naughty or nice.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Rationality may be key to establishing peace, but the irrational importance of sacred values is key to establishing lasting peace.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Narrative, in short. is more than literature, it is the way we understand our lives. If literature merely supplied entertainment, then it wouldn't be as important as it is. Great literature speaks to the deepest level of our humanity; it helps us better understand who we are. Narrative is not only the way we understand our personal and collective identities, it is the source of our ethics, our politics, and our religion. It is, as William James and Jerome Bruner assert, one of our two basic ways of thinking. Narrative isn't irrational -it can be criticized by rational argument- but it can't be derived from reason alone. Mythic (narrative) culture is not a subset of theoretic culture, nor will it ever be. It is older than theoretic culture and remains to this day an indispensable way of relating to the world.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“...there may be observable patterns at a macro level, individual suicides can be understood as outputs of a chaotic system, or mental accidents. They ought to be -predictable unpredictable-.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Suicides are the residue left after the human brain has done the best it can with the information to hand.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Evolution by natural selection tends generally to promote adaptations up to the edge of chaos -the boundary between order and disorder. Where all fitness-relevant regularities have been subsumed, what remains is noise, devoid of predictive utility.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“...the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of ancestral environments.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The first, pian, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Any animal aware that it could relieve its suffering by ending its own life would be expected to seize the opportunity. By this light, suicide can be understood as the default human response to intolerable distress.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Depression can also serve as a signal for the abandoner that the relationship was important to the abandoned person. It may arouse so much empathy in the abandoner that they return to the relationship.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The first, pain, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Nevertheless, my contention is precisely that Homo sapiens sapiens possesses an innate, omnipresent, evolution-shaped predisposition for ordering its world, which among other things extends to form the foundation of mythology, metaphysics, and science. As with all other adaptive predispositions, this human propensity to construct interpretative mental frameworks of the world expresses itself as a powerful urge, a profound emotional need, which humans simply cannot help or do without. We are compulsive meaning seekers. It is this propensity -intertwined as it is with the evolution of symbolic representation and generalized conceptual thought- that is responsible for our species' remarkable career.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“It's not magic, it's science. Neural plasticity is real. Long-term potentiation is any parent or teacher's best friend.”
― Kieran O'Mahony, The Brain-Based Classroom Practical Guide: 60 Simple Tools for Teachers to Implement Now!: Regulate Relate Reason

“I get a prompt about using my Dissociative Cognition System. It takes considerable effort to make even that decision, but I manage to give my systems the OK and immediately I can step back from the crushing burden of misery, cut off from certain aspects of my own biochemistry so that I can function and make rational decisions. It was an essential mod, for someone who was going to be on their own for long periods of time without any social contact. My emotions are still out there, and I can get fascinating readouts about what that locked-away part of me is actually feeling, good, indifferent, bad, worse, but it doesn't touch me unless I choose to open the door again. It's a fine line, I suspect, between useful logic and that pathological numbness that true depression can often lead to, where doing or wanting anything seems like climbing uphill.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race

“Your physical senses, which you may rationally believe pick up energy (electromagnetic energy) from the environment, actually project energy first; they project energy through attention because the physical senses are really attention focusing and modulation organs. And it is this attention that creates your personal world. The energy projected through this attention gives the world substance, thickness, and it is this thickness that you then classify as sight, sound, feeling, etc.

Attention then is an actual force in the world, a type of very specific and powerful energy that is used consciously and subconsciously by all human beings.”
― John Kreiter, The Magnum Opus, A Step by Step Course

“The incompleteness of our knowledge is often addressed with different extrapolations and assumptions, sacrificing precision for ease, and reflecting the self onto the world.

This is not always bad, but it can – easily – become tricky.”
― Ahmad Hijazi, Fuzzy on the Dark Side: Approximate Thinking, and How the Mists of Creativity and Progress Can Become a Prison of Illusion

“Bath me in the water of love,
Dye me with the color of love,
Shroud my body in love,
Take me to my grave in love,
Bury me under the sand of love,
Put a flower of love on my grave,
My soul is flaming in the fire of love for my beloved.”
― Aiyaz Uddin, The Inward Journey

“I was fighting the wrong battle,
I was ignorant of the enemy within,
I was my own hidden enemy,
I was my own misery and suffering,
I was fierce in pointing out the darkness outside,
I was unaware of the inward darkness,
I was searching for my truth elsewhere,
I was just looking at reality in the wrong way,
I was lost because I was looking somewhere,
I was found because I looked at I,
I was attached to the world,
So I couldn’t see the I,
I was detached from my reality,
I was enveloped in the body,
I would not have found I,
If I wouldn’t have got beloved’s grace upon I!”
― Aiyaz Uddin, The Inward Journey

“Deeper integration of technology within the body, as well as the use of neuro-technological and neuropharmacological means of enhancing our bodies could affect how we feel and think – and therefore also how we act on the battlefield. While enhancement may boost cognitive and physical capabilities, they also diminish some deeply human features like compassion and empathy, that have been pivotal to us as a species, both for survival and cooperation.”
― Nayef Al-Rodhan

“English: "Human rethinking is a continuation of evolutionary rethinking."

Česky: „Lidské přemýšlení je pokračováním přemýšlení evoluce.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“English: "Cognition is the delimitation of imagination by experience."

Česky: „Poznávání je okrajování fantazie pomocí zkušenosti.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“Prehistoric humans were too busy clawing their way to survival to consider suicide any sort of necessary option. Perhaps in a situation of imminent death there might be a decision to end one’s own life one’s own way instead of, say, by being ripped limb from limb by a surly gorilla. But apart from that, no, suicide was not a feature of the prehistoric human’s repertoire. In fact, I would further assert that suicide can only be a facet of modern society that expects happiness. And on that and many other bases, I suggest that happiness is a modern invention.”
― Steven Lesk M.D., Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness

“If you’re looking for a word to refer to the process of coming to know things through exposure to the right sort of information in the environment, I’d recommend “learning.”
― Paul Bloom, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

“Nothing is ever lost. Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic ‘mortgage’, as Voegelin called it, reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial ‘breakthrough’. Kings who ruled ‘by divine right’, are obvious examples, but so are presidents who claim to act in accordance with a ‘higher power’. At every point as our story unfolds, we will have to consider the relation between political and religious power. But one thing is certain: the issue never goes away.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“As we have seen, the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice -even human sacrifice- as a concrete expression of radical status difference.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Though normally the handshake simply confirmed the trustworthiness of an agreement, with perhaps an aura of divine protection, Attic grave reliefs suggest a further extension of the idea for they "show handshaking as a symbol of Faith at the parting between the dead and the living. Thus, handshaking was not only a sign of agreement among the living, but the gesture of trust and faith in the supreme departure." With us the handshake is hardly a conscious gesture, but nonetheless one does not expect to be attacked by someone with whom one has just shaken hands. A refusal of a proffered handshake, however, would make the ritual gesture conscious indeed: breaking the ritual raises ominous questions that would require an explanation.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age