Quotes About Psychology

Our fraught way of life gives each of us a narrowly defined role, creating conditions conducive to developing only those elements in our psyche which allow us to grow within the confines of that role. The other areas of our psyche waste away. Hence lack of contact. Here psychological and social factors combine, and produce fear, distrust, moral baseness and the death of hope.

There are many factors that can contribute to software rot. The most important one seems to be the psychology, or culture, at work on a project.

the symptoms of depression cause depression. Loneliness is depressing, but depression also causes loneliness.

In the twentieth century, homosexuality was said to be caused by overbearing mothers and passive fathers; schizophrenia reflected the parents' unconscious wish that their child did not exist; and autism was the result of "refrigerator mothers," whose coldness doomed their children to a fortress of silence. We've now realized that such complex and overdetermined conditions are not the result of parental attitude or behavior.

A mature childhood can be a recipe for an immature adulthood—a principle most publicly borne out by Michael Jackson.

The key to understanding liberals is that "It is the need not of liberty, but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds."16

Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact.

You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.15 You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible.

early stress increases the size of the amygdalae. One study found that an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation reduced the volume of the right basolateral amygdala, and these changes were correlated with a subjective decrease in stress.

solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment inside a maximum-security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a room.

When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2.

las investigaciones indican que los mentirosos confían menos en aquellos a quienes mienten que si no les mintieran; y cuanto más dañinas son sus mentiras, menos confían en sus víctimas, e incluso menos les agradan. Parece que los mentirosos suelen despreciar a las personas a las que mienten para preservar su ego e interpretar que su conducta está justificada.

There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

it was probably a good thing that Foster and Laura Speakman couldn't reproduce, because both of them were fucking nuts.

Everything in your dream means exactly what you think it means.

By changing my thinking patterns, I have somehow become able to excrete a hormone that douses anxiety instead of fuels it.

At least she had a clear picture of what the Lying Game was now: Girl Scouts for psychopaths.

That would have been too obvious, Matt said. You just said I never choose scissors so you had to know I would choose scissors so I couldn't choose scissors because you'd know it. Hence, the rock. Hence the paper covering your rock. You ask her. Well played my friend, Matt said. Well played.

it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.

Innately, the female knows how to cripple by sickening a man with guilt. It is a very special destruct, and she sends her curse to make a fellow impotent.

Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.

Depressives cannot surrender childhood--not even the pains of childhood.