Quotes About Behavior

Without this ability to stand outside your experience, without self-awareness, you would have little ability to moderate and direct your behavior moment to moment. Such real-time, goal-directed modulation of behavior is the key to acting as a mature adult. You need this capacity to free yourself from the automatic flow of experience, and to choose where to direct your attention. Without a director you are a mere automaton, driven by greed, fear, or habit.

Your brain craves patterns and searches for them endlessly. THOMAS B. CZERNER (2001)

Studies of teenage behavior shows that the terrible teens is not a biological necessity, as a number of cultures don't experience this phenomenon. A study of teenagers in Western cultures found that these teenagers have fewer choices than a felon in prison. Food for thought. Finding a way to make a choice, however small, seems to have a measurable impact on the brain, shifting you from an away response to a toward response.

Most dogs, when you hold a leash up, go nuts and run to the door. Crash, on the other hand barely looks up from his spot on the couch. His expression is saying, What the hell are you doing with that thing?

fundamental principle of the body's weight-control systems: Impose a change in behavior (for example, by restricting food), and biology fights back (with increased hunger). Change biology, however, and behavior adapts naturally—suggesting a more effective approach to long-term weight management.

With such limited support, most participants in diet studies don't change their behavior very much, and the comparison groups (for example, people assigned to a low-fat versus a low-carbohydrate diet) don't wind up eating much differently from each other. Not surprisingly, these studies produce very little weight loss in any group.

Risk is asymmetrical because people tend to run away when things go wrong and crowd together when things go well. That's just human nature.

How a painter treats this edge is the real subject of realist painting; how the brush behaves in the vicinity of an edge gives a painting its present-tenseness, the feeling of the eternal present.

This study shows that lifestyle is fundamentally involved in vulnerability to cancer.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it." Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you.

What about people with high cholesterol who keep eating French fries? Do we say a disease is not biological because it's influenced by behavior? No one starts out hoping to become an addict; they just like drugs. No one starts out hoping for a heart attack; they just like fried chicken.

The Turing Test – the sort of thing that only a demented empiricist could devise – is one of the silliest tests ever to be taken seriously as a test. It's equivalent to saying, "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" – even though we know it's actually a machine-duck with no organic parts, which we have painstakingly programmed to exhibit duck behavior … to quack like a duck.

Contrary to popular belief being rich (and having a lot of money) doesn't automatically mean you have class.

Outright bans on plastic bags may not be the best solution, but education and incentives to get people to stop using them are necessary.

abuse of drugs was not "a mysterious and inexplicable natural catastrophe, but a form

For routines you call, rely only on documented behavior. If you can't, for whatever reason, then document your assumption well.

Quantitative data tell us what people are doing. Qualitative data tell us why people are doing it. The best kind of research combines the two kinds of data.

Connecting people though technology • Aligning strategy, culture, practices, and behavior • Sustaining change

If you hang with dogs, then of course you must get treated like dogs.

Love is not something you feel. It's something you do.

What is it with rich people thinking they can starve the poor into good behavior?

I stared at him. I said, "Wait, really? Like there's an actual part of our brain that dictates how many people we can tolerate before we start acting like assholes?" "Congratulations, now you know the single reason why the world is the way it is.

Inappropriate laughter is the universal first sign of madness.