Quotes from Maria Konnikova

Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all.

While today's fraternities are hardly the literary- and debate-inspired groups of yore, their core mission - or, at the least, their ideal core mission and the one touted loudly in their public chapter and promotional materials - remains largely unchanged.

The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.

In the world of speeches and orations, especially historical ones, the persistent misquotation is understandable. You hear a speech. You misremember or mishear a line as something more colorful than it was.

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds.

Creating groups is easy - but to make them meaningful and lasting, you have to give them a common identity that not only unites them but shows them why they are unique.

No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn't taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive.

I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.

Down the road, the most controversial approach to neuroenhancement could be a way not of stimulating the brain but of reengineering it.

Many adult bullies hide behind the idea that bullying happens only among children. They conceive of themselves as adults who know better and are offering their hard-earned wisdom to others. The Internet makes that sort of certainty easier to attain: looking at their screens, adult bullies rarely see the impact of their words and actions.

And, when it comes to politics, it can be awfully difficult to put your desires aside and to acknowledge that the world is a much messier place, where open-minded people might be conservative and liberals may well be conscientious.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

The fact that insomnia is associated with depression suggests that sleep might help us deal with emotionally stressful or otherwise disruptive events.

Las vegas shouldn't exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.

Humans are startlingly bad at detecting fraud. Even when we're on the lookout for signs of deception, studies show, our accuracy is hardly better than chance.

One of the things that women really excel at is reading and reacting to subtle cues. We've always had to do that because men don't have to.

The perfectibility of the human mind is a theme that has captured our imagination for centuries - the notion that, with the right tools, the right approach, the right attitude, we might become better, smarter versions of ourselves.

I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.

Perhaps one day we'll be able to identify and block not just scams but the scammers themselves - before they even target their first victim.

Three-card monte is one of the most persistent and effective cons in history. The games still pop up along city streets. But we tend to dismiss the victims as rubes.

Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.

I've been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I'm between events and in New York, I'm reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.

Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.

The more extreme the story, the more successful it becomes. Emotions on high, empathy engaged, we become primed to help.