Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

That the variation in human characteristics and behavior is distributed like the error in an archer's aim led some nineteenth-century scientists to study the targets toward which the arrows of human existence are aimed.

In fact, studies show that the people with the most accurate self-perceptions tend to be moderately depressed, suffer from low self-esteem, or both. An overly positive self-evaluation, on the other hand, is considered normal and healthy.

So the relevant question is, if thousands of people are tossing coins once a year and have been doing so for decades, what are the chances that one of them, for some fifteen-year period, will toss all heads?

We all hold dear the idea that we're the captain of our own soul, and we're in charge, and it's a very scary feeling when we're not. In fact, that's what psychosis is—the feeling of detachment from reality and that you're not in control, and that's a very frightening feeling for anyone.

It is one thing to suspect that archers and astronomers, chemists and marketers, encounter the same error law; it is another to discover the specific form of that law.

The researchers also investigated whether people will apply the social norms of politeness to computers. For example, when put in a position where they have to criticize someone face-to-face, people often hesitate or sugarcoat their true opinion. Suppose I ask my students, "Did you like my discussion of the stochastic nature of the

The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic.

The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we've achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is nature.

Altering the course of how your brain makes sense of things is a way of short-circuiting the cycle that leads to an unwanted emotion. Psychologists call that guided thinking "reappraisal.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993

We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom. We

law of large numbers is employed because, as we've said, Bernoulli's theorem concerns the way results reflect underlying probabilities when we make a large number of observations.

Historians, whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted.

Deep concentration causes the energy consumption in your brain to go up by only about 1 percent. No matter what you are doing with your conscious mind, it is your unconscious that dominates your mental activity—and therefore uses up most of the energy consumed by the brain. Regardless of whether your conscious mind is idle or engaged, your unconscious mind is hard at work doing the mental equivalent of push-ups, squats, and wind sprints. O

Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data.           A

After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling…. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."6

Humans usually try to guess the pattern, and in the process we allow ourselves to be outperformed by a rat.

IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." I

Today we know that gas as carbon dioxide. Priestley had inadvertently invented a way to create carbonated beverages, but alas, since he was a man of modest means, he didn't commercialize his invention. That was done a few years later by one Johann Jacob Schweppe, whose soda company is still in business today.

This was the first scientific demonstration that the unconscious mind possesses knowledge that escapes the conscious mind.

appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.

while your unconscious mind is working feverishly to do all those things, you can relax in bed, recognizing, seemingly without effort, the lighting fixture on the ceiling—or the words in this book.

As Steve Jobs said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Pearson invented a method, called the chi-square test, by which you can determine whether a set of data actually conforms to the distribution you believe it conforms to.