Quotes About Mind

The authors note that the most remarkable observation of their study is that people find its results very surprising. Indeed, the viewers who fail to see the gorilla are initially sure that it was not there—they cannot imagine missing such a striking event. The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.

System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives.

System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions.

Failures of detection followed the same inverted-V pattern as the dilating pupil. 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.

However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.

The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.

Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing

The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness:

Risk" does not exist "out there," independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of "risk" to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life.

bias is a compelling figure, while noise is the background to which we pay no attention. That is how we remain largely unaware of a large flaw in our judgment.

His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.

I'm in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.

book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind

Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public's mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.

While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.

When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news.

There was no particular reason to do so, but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness.

Daniel Kahneman

The interaction of the two systems is a recurrent theme of the book, and a brief synopsis of the plot is in order.