Patrick O'Brian Quotes

Remember that we can only in our forebrains handle 5-7 items. Our backbrains can handle massive amounts. So when you're given a problem, think about it before you go sleep, and chances are you can solve it by the next morning.

If we're given a number of circumstances to deal with, the brain goes into this mode of trying to find a solution, and it's amazing how good we are at it.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.

Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind. When I work on designing livestock equipment I can test run that equipment in my head like 3-D virtual reality. In fact, when I was in college I used to think that everybody was able to do that.

Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.

I can't solve a puzzle for the life of me - my brain doesn't work that way. But I can take a very simple idea and extrapolate from it and spend time with it and pull things out of it.

Creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes.

Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.

Thought makes everything fit for use.

Thinking is one of the most important weapons in dealing with problems

The brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard.

The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds.

The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature's genitals.

Life is filled with problems to be solved and tensions to be managed. Sometimes it helps to know which is which.

From now on you're going to have to think. There's a reason why we're born with brains in our heads, not rocks.

The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies... Do it in the 'closed' mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the 'open' mode... because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.

Usually, I'm pretty good about sorting through the options and then making decisions that I'm confident are the best decisions in that moment, given the information we have. But there are times where I think I wish I could have imagined a different level of insight.

We need to be in the open mode when we are pondering a problem, but, once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it.

What thought can think, another thought can mend.

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.

Do you have a brain? Then you can think your way out of it. The reason we have brains is so we can figure out how to do things.

If you strike upon a thought that baffles you, break off from that entanglement and try another, so shall your wits be fresh to start again.