Cognitive Science Quotes

“Any human endeavor rooted in the pursuit of truth must rely on fact and not feelings.”
― Gad Saad, Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

“It is not about whether you have free will, rather it is about whether you have enough experience to make the best possible wilful decision in the current moment of life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“We are both thinking and feeling animals. The challenge is to know when to activate the cognitive (thinking) versus the affective (feeling) systems.”
― Gad Saad, Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

“Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable.

Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow.
And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness.

The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“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.”
― David Amerland, The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

“...you have to acknowledge the possibility that generative metaphors are a major phenomenon in language and an important clue to our cognitive makeup. Abstract ideas are connected in a systematic way to more concrete experiences.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work.

Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“Children's minds need not innately embody language structures, if languages embody the predispositions of children's minds!”
― Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

“We the experts in cognitive and behavioral sciences can predict human behavior but not human potential. What this means is that, though we can tell how a person is likely to feel, think and behave in a certain situation, we still cannot tell what a person is capable of. Hence the possibilities that a person holds in their neurons are immeasurable.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Good Scientist: When Science and Service Combine

“In short, it is difficult to see any convincing evidence for anything that will replace religion in human affairs. Religion is a deeply human trait. The content of religion will surely change over the longer term, but, for better or for worse, it is likely to remain with us.”
― Robin I.M. Dunbar, How Religion Evolved

“Without an environment with emotional care and cognitive stimulation, the human brain cannot develop normally.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman

“Much of what is considered problematic in the world has more to do with thoughts and derivatives from thoughts than with the physics of it all”
― Charles Morgan, Opinions

“In game theory, as in applications of other technologies that use RPT [Revealed Preference Theory], the purpose of the machinery is to tell us what happens when patterns of behavior instantiate some particular strategic vector, payoff matrix, and distribution of information—for example, a PD [Prisoner's Dilemma]—that we’re empirically motivated to regard as a correct model of a target situation. The motivational history that produced this vector in a given case is irrelevant to which game is instantiated, or to the location of its equilibrium or equilibria. As Binmore (1994, pp. 95–256) emphasizes at length, if, in the case of any putative PD, there is any available story that would rationalize cooperation by either player, then it follows as a matter of logic that the modeler has assigned at least one of them the wrong utility function (or has mistakenly assumed perfect information, or has failed to detect a commitment action) and so made a mistake in taking their game as an instance of the (one-shot) PD. Perhaps she has not observed enough of their behavior to have inferred an accurate model of the agents they instantiate. The game theorist’s solution algorithms, in themselves, are not empirical hypotheses about anything. Applications of them will be only as good, for purposes of either normative strategic advice or empirical explanation, as the empirical model of the players constructed from the intentional stance is accurate. It is a much-cited fact from the experimental economics literature that when people are brought into laboratories and set into situations contrived to induce PDs, substantial numbers cooperate. What follows from this, by proper use of RPT, not in discredit of it, is that the experimental setup has failed to induce a PD after all. The players’ behavior indicates that their preferences have been misrepresented in the specification of their game as a PD. A game is a mathematical representation of a situation, and the operation of solving a game is an exercise in deductive reasoning. Like any deductive argument, it adds no new empirical information not already contained in the premises. However, it can be of explanatory value in revealing structural relations among facts that we otherwise might not have noticed.”
― Don Ross

“Emotions such as happiness. fear, lust, disgust, or envy, serve as solutions to recurring evolutionary challenges that our ancestors have faced.”
― Gad Saad, Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

“While AI technology has reached important levels of performances in narrow settings, the missing part concerns exactly the study of how to create artificial companions (embodied and disembodied) able to integrate different skills in order to help humans in their everyday activities. Similarly, computational cognitive science is interested in individuating how the brain and the mind works as integrated systems. This renewed convergence is, in my view, a necessity driven by the fact that modern and future AI and CogSci research will be again disciplines interested in the same topic: namely the discovery of the mechanisms enabling multitasking intelligence. In order to advance the scientific knowledge in their respective field, in fact, they need to evolve and become sciences (of the artificial) studying the mysteries of "integrated intelligence". Time seems mature for a renewed collaboration.”
― Antonio Lieto, Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds

“From a modelling perspective, there is not a definitive “winning” method in the “science of artificial”. Different approaches are useful for modelling certain classes of cognitive phenomena, but no one can account for all aspects of cognition”
― Antonio Lieto, Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds

“it is not sufficient for an artificial system to obtain human (or super-human) level performances in specific tasks to attach to it the label “cognitive system”
― Antonio Lieto, Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds

“The Minimal Cognitive Grid (MCG) provides a non-subjective, graded, evaluation framework allowing both quantitative and qualitative analysis about the cognitive adequacy and the human-like performances of artificial systems (in both single and multi-tasking settings).
In principle (and in perspective), the psychometric declination of one of its composing dimensions (in particular the “performance match”) could be also useful to evaluate the human-level performances in both narrow and unrestricted settings.”
― Antonio Lieto, Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds

“Elinizdeki kitap, Türkiye' de oldukça yeni sayılabilecek disiplinlerarası bir alana, bilişsel bilimlere bir giriş olarak okunabilecek ya da ders kitabı olarak kullanılabilecek bir yapıt...”
― Ulaş Başar Gezgin, Bilişsel Bilimler Elkitabı

“This collection consists of the following pieces: COGNITIVE SCIENCE 1. The Embodied Cognition View 2. On Flanagan's Ideas On Dreams and Ahead: An Attempt To Locate Dreaming Phenomenon Under The Superclass Of Consciousness 3. "The Pragmatics of Cartoons: The Interaction of Bystander Humorosity vs. Agent-Patient Humorosity." 4. Integrationist School or on 'Rethinking Language'. 5. On Steven Pinker's 'Language Instinct' or Some Remarks on Evolutionary Psycholinguistics 6. On the (Im)Possibility of Psychotherapist Computer Programs: An Investigation within the Realm of Epistemology 7. Thai Language: A Brief Typology. ART NARRATIVES 8. Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan's Stories from the Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry. 9. A Critique of The Stories By South East Asian Writing Awardees 10. Mulholland Drive: Another impasse for the American film industry. 11. On 'About Schmidt' 12. On Black spirituals. 13. The possibility of an African American poetry.”
― Ulaş Başar Gezgin, Cognition And Art: Essays On Cognitive Science And Art Narratives

“Пинтупи (одно из племен австралийских аборигенов) считают способность думать ключем к взрослению и к выходу из дикой эмоциональности, а "думать", "понимать" и "слышать" - это один и тот же глагол kulininpa, который буквально значит именно "слышать", и потому местом мышления считается ухо - в отличие от чувства, чье место в желудке.”
― Ян Плампер, История эмоций

“The extension of minds into the world through the use of artifacts was perhaps the last vital step in the evolution of culture that underlies the modern mind. Written symbols, alphabets and number systems, are ways of using the world to hold ideas. These external symbols allow a society a capacity for systematic thinking that would be impossible otherwise, a process we have referred to earlier as progressive externalization. Indeed, these external devices are not just static devices for memory storage. We have built external devices that process information, mirroring the process of thought inside our heads, at least loosely. Consider numerical calculation. You are limited in the amount of numbers you can easily add in your head. A paper and pencil increase this ability tremendously by letting you manipulate external symbols and hold intermediate steps in the calculation. By using artifacts that themselves process symbols, such as a handheld calculator, however, you can dramatically extend the realm of thought.”
― Steven R. Quartz, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are

“The Human Animal (A Sonnet)

The civilized know how uncivilized they are,
The uncivilized insist on being deemed civilized.
The victor knows the fallacy of being the victor,
The wise knows there is no such thing as being wise.
The real human is aware of their inhuman predispositions,
While the inhuman fails to acknowledge all primitive bent.
And there is no question of the rise of civilization,
If there is no question of questioning the self.
The animal is animal for it lacks the brain capacity,
For self-correction beyond the need of self-preservation.
But more animal than animal is the so-called human being,
That despite having the brains, fails to act in ascension.
It is no human that does not know how animal they are.
The animal becomes human, the moment it becomes aware.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz

“The I-PFC extends between the longitudinal cerebral fissure that divides the two cerebral hemispheres and the lateral fissure below.
This region receives processed multimodal information and has been described as a place "where past and future meet" by associating memories from the past with future actions.”
― Andreas Nieder, A Brain for Numbers: The Biology of the Number Instinct

“Life without numbers is inconceivable for us. How else would we count objects, tell time, calculate prices, and so on? Our scientifically and technically advanced culture simply would not exist without numbers.”
― Andreas Nieder, A Brain for Numbers: The Biology of the Number Instinct

“Storytelling is an important cognitive skill that helps us to understand concepts and apply logic. This is why I use "Storytelling" in my classes. You can make a session interesting by telling stories to your students and assisting them in their imagination and learning.”
― Avijeet Das

“Imaginistic rituals, especially more severe types involving high stress, trauma, or other forms of shared intense emotion, can lead to identity fusion. Identity fusion is a visceral sense of -oneness- with other group members where acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of the group are not uncommon. Imaginistic rituals tend to be more frequent among smaller, more closely-knit groups where a strong sense of unity is necessary to accomplish challenging goals (for example, sports teams, Nay Seals, subversive political movements, etc.).”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“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

“People are Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs) of their actions [and previous selves], with a varying number of data points.

You(Today) = Acts(Today)*a + You(Yesterday)*b

You are an expanding fuzzy network!”
― Ahmad Hijazi, Fuzzy on the Dark Side: Approximate Thinking, and How the Mists of Creativity and Progress Can Become a Prison of Illusion

“AI can manifest a unique form of purposefulness distinct from traditional human-like consciousness and emotions, critically examining both supporting evidence and opposing views.”
― Damian Mingle