Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be available to posterity. To that the presiding judge famously replied, "The republic has no need of scientists.

Albert Einstein wrote, "One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.… Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences.

Modeling himself after Newton, Quételet desired to create a new "social physics" describing the laws of human behavior. In Quételet's analogy, just as an object, if undisturbed, continues in its state of motion, so the mass behavior of people, if social conditions remain unchanged, remains constant.

A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear translated into about 1,000 more highway fatalities in that period than in the same period the year before—hidden casualties of the September 11 attack.24 But

moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the song. Again, it's the butterfly effect.

The lesson is that, though we expect our best thinking time to be when we are fresh, our elastic thinking capacity may be highest when we feel "burnt out." That's good to know when scheduling your tasks—you could be better at generating imaginative ideas if you do that kind of thinking after working on a chore that involves a period of tedious, focused effort that strains your powers of concentration.

As we'll see, the human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and can therefore have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors.

true randomness sometimes produces repetition, but when users heard the same song or songs by the same artist played back-to-back, they believed the shuffling wasn't random. And so the company made the feature "less random to make it feel more random," said Apple founder Steve Jobs.12 One

one of the most beneficial things we can do for ourselves is to look for ways to exercise control over our lives—or at least to look for ways that help us feel that we do.

The fact that we assess information in a biased manner and are unaware we are doing so can be a real stumbling block in negotiations, even if both sides sincerely seek a fair settlement.

Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different.    ââ'¬â€JAMES BORG

survival in Nazi concentration camps "depended on one's ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action

except fMRI maps the activity of the brain's different structures by detecting the blood flow that waxes and wanes, just slightly, as that activity varies. In this way fMRI offers three-dimensional pictures of the working brain, inside and out, mapping, to a resolution of about a millimeter, the level of activity throughout the organ.

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to keep control of some important aspects of one's life despite an environment that seemed overwhelming.

the elasticity of our thinking allows us to move beyond the existing world of our senses and invent new concepts.

but dreams and myths are expressions of the human heart.

Later studies showed that a prior sense of helplessness and lack of control is linked to both stress and the onset of disease.

If you really want to understand the social world, if you really want to understand yourself and others, and, beyond that, if you really want to overcome many of the obstacles that prevent you from living your fullest, richest life, you need to understand the influence of the subliminal world that is hidden within each of us.

in 1958, the average life span of companies in the S&P 500 was sixty-one years. Today it is about twenty.

there remains the big picture, the question of how much randomness contributes to where we are in life and how well we can predict where we are

A failure doesn't mean you are unworthy, nor does it preclude success on the next try.

Politicians often misuse science for political ends and to pursue their own agenda.