Quotes About Mind

Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People

SPEAKING OF PRIMING "The sight of all these people in uniforms does not prime creativity." "The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works." "They were primed to find flaws, and this is exactly what they found." "His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us." "I made myself smile and I'm actually feeling better!

The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight—nothing in between

when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.

We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics." When our attention is called to an event, associative memory will look for its cause—more precisely, activation will automatically spread to any cause that is already stored in memory.

You may know that there is really (almost) nothing to worry about, but you cannot help images of disaster from coming to mind.

The answer was straightforward: instances of the class will be retrieved from memory, and if retrieval is easy and fluent, the category will be judged to be large. We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by "the ease with which instances come to mind.

The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.

Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The

Systematic errors are known as biases

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I

Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities.

The similarity was reassuring: the pupil was a good measure of the physical arousal that accompanies mental effort, and we could go ahead and use it to understand how the mind works.

The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.

Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts.

The procedure I adopted to tame the halo effect conforms to a general principle: decorrelate error!

The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. The

When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.

The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme of Part 3, which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.

Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer.

Stanovich argues that high intelligence does not make people immune to biases. Another ability is involved, which he labels rationality. Stanovich's concept of a rational person is similar to what I earlier labeled "engaged." The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence. In his view, superficial or "lazy" thinking is a flaw in the reflective mind, a failure of rationality.