Quotes from Maria Konnikova

Benign envy can sound a lot like admiration. The difference is that, while admiration feels good, envy is painful.

It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.

It's strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we're sleeping, we're vulnerable - and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive.

No one is ever bias-free, but some people let their biases influence their actions more than others.

Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.

Gender perception can be a pernicious thing: Where a lack of warmth passes in a male, in a woman, it's deadly.

Finding the one right candidate in a group is hard, and companies don't have much time to figure out exactly which questions can help them tell similar-seeming candidates apart.

Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren't true.

Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic - the strong attacking the weak.

In real life, having your poetry criticized by T.S. Eliot could cause you to doubt your poetic gifts. But imagining it in a dream has the opposite effect. That dream could become the source for a story.

Our lives don't make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.

The name 'con artist' really does capture it. They're artists, and I have admiration for all artists.

The problems of reporting a bully - or, if you are a bully, of becoming less of one - become much more intractable, because your reputation surrounds you, and behavioral patterns are harder to escape.

Fraternities breed leaders. That, at least, is what most any chapter website will tell you, in not so many words - and the message certainly makes for a compelling rationale for joining the Greek system.

Erik Seidel ended up introducing me to some of the best players in the world, a few of whom also agreed to take me on to coach me. So I had access to the best poker minds in the world to help me study and figure things out.

I've figured out how to turn what's different about me and limitations - I'm new to this world, I'm a woman, I don't have a math background - and how I use that to my advantage. They're what make me unique. In poker you learn very quickly, if you play like everyone else, you'll be fine, but you'll never be great.

To the untrained eye, poker seems deceptively easy.

Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.

As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we'll never again come close to achieving... we are learning about our world and its possibilities.

Some of the elements of sleep hygiene are basically the same as good health practices. Nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol all negatively impact sleep, the more so the closer they're consumed to bedtime.

I don't think anyone could have predicted that I would have gone in less than a year from not knowing how many cards were in a deck to winning a major poker title.

We don't appreciate luck in life when things are going well. No matter how smart I am and how I prepare, there are things that catch you off guard.

Play up the outrage factor and suddenly groups bond together like never before - and prepare to attack like never before.

Light helps the body predict the future: it's a sign of how our environment will change in the coming hours and days, and our bodies prepare themselves accordingly.