Quotes from Tom Vanderbilt

The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think.

The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think.

Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.

Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.

It's probably no accident that whenever one hears of a smart technology, it refers to something that has been taken out of human control.

As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, 'You can't adapt to commuting, because it's entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'

When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard.

There is a simple mantra you can carry about you in traffic: When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard. Most crashes, after all, happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.

This is the reason the whole 'keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel, use the hands-free handset' idea is a silly thing," Simons said. "Having your eyes on the road doesn't do any good unless your attention is on the road too.

What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance," writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "rather than the quality of experience." But what if we don't want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?

Children, in a very real sense, have beginners' minds, open to wider possibilities. They see the world with fresher eyes, are less burdened with preconception and past experience, and are less guided by what they know to be true. They are more likely to pick up details that adults might discard as irrelevant. Because they're less concerned with being wrong or looking foolish, children often ask questions that adults won't ask.

We all have wanted, at one time or another, to appear as an idealized self. "I'm actually a quite different person," as the playwright Ödön von Horváth wrote, "I just never get around to being him.

The pursuit of a kind of absolute safety, above all other considerations of what makes places good environments, has not only made those streets and cities less attractive, it has, in many cases, made them less safe.

In English-language speech, we spend five times as much time producing vowels as consonants. In singing, that ratio can hit two hundred to one.

Traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a mechanical one.

If we really felt bad about a book we had read and liked... we would feel shame, not guilt.

Guilty pleasure" is a curious concept. There is a question of causality: Does the pleasure cause the guilt, or does it in fact stem from it? Would guilty pleasures be pleasurable without guilt? Or does the guilt come because we are not feeling any guilt for indulging in the pleasure?

If you want to improve in chess," wrote Ericsson, "you don't do it by playing chess. You do it with solitary study of the grandmasters' games.

A man…progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.*1

Katz argues that we are engaging in a kind of theatrical storytelling, inside of our cars, angrily "constructing moral dramas"15 in which we are the wronged victims—and the "avenging hero"—in some traffic epic of larger importance.

The anxious positioning Bourdieu had noted could be felt in a tweeted "humblebrag," an attempt to claim cultural capital without looking as if one were doing so.

As you plunge into learning some art or skill, the world around you appears new and bursting with infinite horizons. Each day brims with new discoveries as you take your tentative first steps, slowly pushing the bounds of exploration. You make mistakes, but even these are empowering, because they are mistakes you have never made before.

During a period of life when most of us do not have fancy watches or cars, music becomes a cheap, socially important signal of distinction. We are trying on, like silk-screened T-shirts, various identities.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," writes Shunryu Suzuki. "In the expert's mind there are few.