Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

Thus even random patterns can be interpreted as compelling evidence if they relate to our preconceived notions.

By his own assessment, he was no genius. He had no great quickness of apprehension or wit or power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought. On the many occasions when I share those feelings, I find it encouraging to review those words because that Englishman did okay for himself—his name was Charles Darwin.

Acceptance is the heart of the stoic approach: you can lessen emotional pain if you accept that the "worst" may happen and focus only on what you can do to respond

Empowering emotions help you discover the lessons of every situation and move toward your goals. Disempowering interpretations tie you to negativity and get in the way of your goals. Reappraisal involves recognizing the negative pattern developing in your thoughts and changing it to one that is more desirable, but in a manner that is still based in reality.

when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed.

Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.

labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results.

We can focus on the ability to react to events rather than relying on the ability to predict them, on qualities like flexibility, confidence, courage, and perseverance.

As our lives have been flooded with novelty and change, they have become more hectic than ever before, at both home and work. We are barraged by a constant stream of information, and thanks to all of our screens and devices, we are in ceaseless contact with dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of other people, rarely (if ever) enjoying any complete downtime.

American people whether they agree that plants create the oxygen in the air, light travels faster than sound, or you cannot make radioactive milk safe by boiling it, you will get double-digit disagreement in each case (13 percent, 24 percent, and 35 percent, respectively

Over the hundreds of at bats he has each year, those random factors usually average out and result in some typical home run production that increases as the player becomes more skillful and then eventually decreases owing to the same process

On an emotional level many people resist the idea that random influences are important even if, on an intellectual level, they understand that they are.

In fact, the first clock to record hours of equal length wasn't invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, which meant that an "hour" might be more than twice as long in June as in December (in London, for example, it varied from 38 to 82 of today's minutes).

We are inclined, that is, to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring movie stars and to think that the richest people in the world must also be the smartest.

These subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play very little part in our daily lives. But they are the almost invisible roots of our conscious thoughts.

We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe.

first no one knew exactly how to interpret

We cannot see a person's potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person.

Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.

Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child's third-grade report card can be read in many ways. Yet interpreting the role of chance in an event is not like intepreting a Rorschach blot; there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.

The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow.

As Lerner had predicted, the observers had a need to understand the situation in terms of cause and effect.

The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the "new unconscious," to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurologist-turned-clinician named Sigmund Freud.

we are highly invested in feeling different from one another—and superior—no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being. You