Cognitive Surplus Quotes

This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects. ~ Clay Shirky

Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public. ~ Clay Shirky

Because of propaganda induced cognitive dissonance, most people hate themselves and don't even know it. ~ Bryant McGill

Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In that brief glance Vronsky has time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. She deliberately extinguished the light in her her eyes, but it shone against her will in a barely noticeable smile. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We've literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's need for glucose. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions. ~ Sean Carroll

A person breathes in nearly 2 pounds of oxygen a day, so that's the daily requirement for about ten thousand people. Every walk in the forest is like taking a shower in oxygen. But only during the day. Trees manufacture large amounts of carbohydrates not only to lay them down as wood but also to satisfy their hunger. Trees use carbohydrates as fuel, just as we do, and when they do, they convert sugar into energy and carbon dioxide. During the day, this doesn't affect the air much because after all the additions and subtractions, there is still that surplus oxygen I just mentioned. At night, however, the trees don't photosynthesize, and so they don't break down carbon dioxide. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the darkness, it's all about using carbohydrates, burning sugar in the cells' power-generating stations, and releasing carbon dioxide. But don't worry, you won't suffocate if you take a nighttime ramble! A steady movement of air through the forest ensures that all the gases are well mixed at all times, and so the drop in oxygen near the ground is not particularly noticeable. ~ Peter Wohlleben

Language is one of the more complex human cognitive functions," Narly Golestani, Group Leader of the university's Brain and Language Lab, tells me during a recent visit. "There's been a lot of work on bilingualism. Interpretation goes one step beyond that because the two languages are active simultaneously. And not just in one modality, because you have perception and production at the same time. So the brain regions involved go to an extremely high level, beyond language"["In other words: inside the lives and minds of real-time translators," Mosaic, November 18, 2014]. ~ Geoff Watts

When we apologize for something we've done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn't align with our values, guilt - not shame - is most often the driving force. We feel guilty when we hold up something we've done or failed to do against our values and find they don't match up. It's an uncomfortable feeling, but one that's helpful. The psychological discomfort, something similar to cognitive dissonance, is what motivates meaningful change. Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame's is destructive. In fact, in my research I found that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better. ~ Brene Brown

The tasks that we studied varied considerably in their effects on the pupil. At baseline, our subjects were awake, aware, and ready to engage in a task - probably at a higher level of arousal and cognitive readiness than usual. ~ Daniel Kahneman

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. ~ Jonathan Haidt

To get the most accurate MBTI type for yourself, you need to identify the cognitive functions you rely on and the specific order you use them in. It's a surprise to many when they find out that this is in fact the whole point of the assessment. The end game isn't simply to label your preferences but to discover the mental processes that underpin your personality. ~ Anne Bogel

Victim-stancing - whereby the offender claims and believes that s/he is the real victim (one of the most prevalent sophistries in the false memory controversies) ~ Harvey L. Schwartz

A successful society is characterized by a rising living standard for its population, increasing investment in factories and basic infrastructure, and the generation of additional surplus, which is invested in generating new discoveries in science and technology. ~ Robert Trout

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. ~ Steven Pinker

Research for social justice expands and improves the conditions for justice; it is an intellectual, cognitive and moral project, often fraught, never complete, but worthwhile ~ Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Kazu, now that she thought of it, realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man's spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man's skin. ~ Yukio Mishima

The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations. ~ Esther Dyson

Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlour game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Cognitive reality of an individual solely arises from the make-up of that individual's brain structure. Any kind of damage, like stroke can alter this reality without the awareness of the individual. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Sri Lankan Socioeconomics 101

If people stopped chasing after power and connections and realized that they have all the power they need within themselves, to create whatever they want with their lives:
there will be more friendships than contacts, less gold-diggers, more marriages based on love, better family lives, stable and enriched childhoods leading to a well endowed, disciplined and better educated workforce. There will be loyalty and ingenuity and better standards of education. Abundance of well educated individuals => pressure to innovate =>increased entrepreneurship, improved economy.High functioning economy attracting more foreign capital => export surplus. Educated workforce + increased involvement in international business => pressure to improve foreign allies and foreign policy => pressure to improve transparency => decrease in corruption.

So stop sitting around complaining about corruption and (with all due respect,) get off your ass and do something for yourself. Stop chasing after other people's power and chase after your own dreams and you will have all the power you need. ~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

Out of your surplus, you can help your allies, and Israel is a great ally. And this is no particular animus of Israel, but what I will say, and I will say over and over again, we cannot give away money we don't have. ~ Rand Paul

Companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that's sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a sunset with a cowboy smoking and forcing an association between great romantic moments and some given product that, logically, has no possible connection to it. You seek a romantic moment and what you get is cancer. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. "Categories" is a nicer, more neutral word than "stereotypes," but it's the same thing. Cognitive psychologists consider stereotypes to be energy-saving devices that allow us to make efficient decisions on the basis of past experience; help us quickly process new information and retrieve memories; make sense of real differences between groups; and predict, often with considerable accuracy, how others will behave or how they think.24 We wisely rely on stereotypes and the quick information they give us to avoid danger, approach possible new friends, choose one school or job over another, or decide that that person across this crowded room will be the love of our lives. ~ Carol Tavris

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. ~ Steven Pinker

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. ~ David Chalmers

What makes some cognitive operations more demanding and effortful than others? What outcomes must we purchase in the currency of attention? What can System 2 do that System 1 cannot? We now have tentative answers to these questions. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Consciousness is an outcome of a recursively comparative memory in which previous self-nonself categorizations are continually related to ongoing present perceptual categorizations and their short term succession, before such categorizations have become part of that memory. ~ Edelman Gerald

Did her faint eccentricity of manner mask something more serious, some fundamental cognitive problem? ~ Robert Galbraith

The game theoretical analysis of the chain store game by backward induction is very easy and does not put any strain on the cognitive abilities of human beings. Even game theoretically untrained persons understand the backward induction argument without difficulty. Nevertheless, the conclusion is behaviorally unacceptable. The author was so worried about this contradiction that he felt three weeks of physical discomfort. ~ Reinhard Selten

In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional. ~ Judith M Bardwick

I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow ... it is the honest state before the apple. ~ D.H. Lawrence

A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence. Page 115 ~ Sonia Sotomayor

A recent event hosted by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists got together with film makers to discuss what both groups have learned
the scientists through painstaking experiments and analysis, and the film makers by intuition and experience
about the mechanisms of attention and perception. ~ Anonymous

Women's ideas of themselves had changed, but the world's idea of women, somehow, had not. The cognitive dissonance was palpable at all times. ~ Carina Chocano

When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese - not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year. ~ Michael Moss

I'm not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn't necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one's own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn't care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about. ~ Roger Schank

Some international relations scholars would posit that interest in zombies is an indirect attempt to get a cognitive grip on what U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the "unknown knowns" in international security. Perhaps, however, there also exists a genuine but publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from the grave and feasting upon the entrails of the living. ~ Daniel Drezner

This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: "To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."33 Here are a few examples of the cluster illusion. The ~ Steven Pinker

If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It sure if terrific to be in the back seat of a car full of all the people in your affinity group, and as you zip down the center of the road the radio is going boodeley-boodeley-boo in some bluegrass heart song to open space, and, whoopee, you're hugging all the committed girls who love you just as the boys love you but even more so, maybe, because Bug never forgot that a Swiss army knife, for instance, does everything well and nothing excellently; and to do something excellently a good navy surplus kelp-slitting blade is far superior to a thousand sawtoothed frogman's specials; and a gun is worth a thousand knives; and a good friend is worth a thousand guns; and ten minutes' bored talk about the weather with any girl is worth a thousand friends at your back on the Great Trek of 1836, at least at that time in his life, perhaps because until he joined the affinity group none of his friends had ever been girls; but now everyone was his friend, especially the girls (but he only thought that; he didn't say it, didn't want anyone to claim that he was a sexist). ~ William T. Vollmann