cognitive-science

When finally substantiated by scientific means, such a view will allow an individual to see his place in the world with greater clarity-- how he came from the world and how he may contribute to his fellows while he enjoys for a brief time the privilege of consciousness and communication.

Consciousness may be seen as the haughty and restless second cousin of morphology. Memory is its mistress, perception its somewhat abused wife, logic its housekeeper, and language its poorly paid secretary

Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.

Humanity has pondered over the meaning of God since its beginning. It is one of those cognitive features that came along with the advent of modern Human Consciousness.

Memory results from a process of continual re-categorization which, by its nature, must be procedural and involve continual motor activity and repeated rehearsal.

If you are one of those people who can__ hold a lot in mind at once__ou lose focus and start daydreaming in lectures, and have to get to someplace quiet to focus so you can use your working memory to its maximum__ell, welcome to the clan of the creative. Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations. Because your learning new, more creative combinations. Having a somewhat smaller working memory, which grows from the focusing abilities of the prefrontal cortex, doesn__ lock everything up so tightly, you can more easily get input from other parts of your brain. These other areas, which include the sensory cortex, not only are more in tune with what__ going on in the environment, but also are the source of dreams, not to mention creative ideas. You may have to work harder sometimes (or even much of the time) to understand what__ going on, but once you__e got something chunked, you can take that chunk and turn it outside in and inside round__utting it through creative paces even you didn__ think you were capable of! Here__ another point to put into your mental chunker: Chess, that bastion of intellectuals, has some elite players with roughly average IQs. These seemingly middling intellects are able to do better than some more intelligent players because they practice more. That__ the key idea. Every chess player, whether average or elite, grows talent by practicing. It is the practice__articularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material__hat can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more __atural_ gifts. Just as you can practice lifting weights and get bigger muscles over time, you can also practice certain mental patterns that deepen and enlarge in your mind.

A synthesis__n abstraction, chunk, or gist idea__s a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we__e working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That__ why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds__e form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patterns we already possess, allowing us to more readily see and develop other related patterns. Once we have created a chunk as a neural pattern, we can more easily pass that chunked pattern to others, as Cajal and other great artists, poets, scientists, and writers have done for millennia, Once other people grasp that chunk, not only can they use it, but also they can more easily create similar chunks that apply to other areas in their lives__n important part of the creative process.

Characteristics of System 1: _ generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions _ operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control _ can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search) _ executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training _ creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory _ links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance _ distinguishes the surprising from the normal _ infers and invents causes and intentions _ neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt _ is biased to believe and confirm _ exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect) _ focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)_ generates a limited set of basic assessments _ represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate_ matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness) _ computes more than intended (mental shotgun) _ sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics) _ is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)* _ overweights low probabilities* _ shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)* _ responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)* _ frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*

Mindless action without a real understanding of the ramifications is only likely to result in serious miscalculations or a colossal waste of time. Avoid both by using your judgment, filtered through both knowledge and experience. Use common sense and logic as a counterbalance to emotion.

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

Pathology can indeed cause experiences of the Kingdom of God, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology.

Truly to realize the ambitions of a science of mind does not solely involve learning about such issues as how we know, perceive and solve problems; it involves finding out tow hat extent the world outside us is knowable by us, and indeed prescribing the limits of inquiry for disciplines like Physics which claim to afford knowledge of the external physical world.

In every walk of life, you do have the freedom to choose, but that freedom is based on the perception of the world and yourself which you have gained until that moment of life.

The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.

Each of your brains creates its own myth about the universe.

[O]ur percept is an elaborate computer model in the brain, constructed on the basis of information coming from [the environment], but transformed in the head into a form in which that information can be used. Wavelength differences in the light out there become coded as 'colour' differences in the computer model in the head. Shape and other attributes are encoded in the same kind of way, encoded into a form that is convenient to handle. The sensation of seeing is, for us, very different from the sensation of hearing, but this cannot be directly due to the physical differences between light and sound. Both light and sound are, after all, translated by the respective sense organs into the same kind of nerve impulses. It is impossible to tell, from the physical attributes of a nerve impulse, whether it is conveying information about light, about sound or about smell. The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing and the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model of the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell. It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound.

Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.

[T]he form that an animal's subjective experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model. That model will be designed, in evolution, for its suitability for useful internal representation, irrespective of the physical stimuli that come to it from outside. Bats and we need the same kind of internal model for representing the position of objects in three-dimensional space. The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant.