Cognitive Filtering Quotes

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

We're receiving information from all the planes of our consciousness all the time, but we don't acknowledge their existence; we treat the information as static, as noise.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

Went in at the one ear and out at the other.

[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.

Your mind doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Your mindacts on what you feed it. Feed it good thoughts.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

People are so... seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood.

I have often thought if the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of the wise man and that of the fool. There are infinite reveries, numberless extravagances, and a perpetual train of vanities which pass through both. The great difference is, that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words.

I think everyone spins. You would just be an empty vacant shell reporting facts. I mean, you have your life that you bring with you to every moment that happens.

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

People say I have a distorted lens. I think I see things as they really are.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

People like things that make sense to them; your perspective is your reality.

We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then 'see' the world through the self we have created.

As a result of all his education, from everything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all.

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

Attention for children is so much about input, and the brain can only filter so much - I don't know how many millions of messages that come through the brain, and we can only filter so much through it.