cognitive strain Quotes

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

There's a lot of research that indicates the brain rewards us for multi-tasking by giving us a shot of neurochemicals whenever we start a new task. Our brain rewards us even as our performance in every task degrades. We don't even notice that our performance is bad. We don't care. We feel like masters of the universe because our brain is chemically rewarding us for multi-tasking.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.

Learned researches lead to headaches, constipation, and befuddled quarreling.

My mind is turning into kind of a fine gelatinous ball of pepper

As an actor, it's exhausting being someone else. It's not physically demanding, but it's mentally demanding, if you do the job the way you should.

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.

When I'm writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can't read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.

I don’t want to start thinking again. Not like I have this last week. I can’t think again. Not ever again.

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.

People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.

It's exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.

Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.

Every year, it takes more brains to navigate this complicated world. More people are falling below what I call the 'incompetence line' through no fault of their own.

The more decisions we make in a day, the more likely we are to make bad decisions - because deciding wears us down. You start making decisions in the morning, and by the middle of the afternoon, you're running on fumes.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.

Listening to the radio every day for an entire year was a prison sentence. It was the most depressing, annoying, debilitating project I have ever undertaken, and I have a master's degree in art history.

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.