Quotes About Mind

the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there's more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.

Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion does most of the work.

One of the greatest truths in psychology is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. To be human is to feel pulled in different directions, and to marvel—sometimes in horror—at your inability to control your own actions.

BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to "do" morality, just as it's designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it's also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

For most of us, it's not every day or even every month that we change our mind about a moral issue without any prompting from anyone else. Far more common than such private mind changing is social influence.

La conclusión es que la mente humana está preparada para el tribalismo. La evolución humana no es sólo la historia de unos individuos que compiten con otros dentro de cada grupo; es también la historia de grupos que compiten contra otros, a veces con violencia.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."32

But in psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can't be done by reasoning, math, or logic. It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy.

This ancient idea deserves respect, and it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world.

Yet the split-brain studies were important in psychology because they showed in such an eerie way that the mind is a confederation of modules capable of working independently and even, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Split

We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it. It imperiously contests for authority with our will.8

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion.

One of the greatest truths in psychology is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.1 To be human is to feel pulled in different directions, and to marvel—sometimes in horror—at your inability to control your own actions.

The difference between a mind asking "Must I believe it?" versus "Can I believe it?" is so profound that it even influences visual perception. Subjects who thought that they'd get something good if a computer flashed up a letter rather than a number were more likely to see the ambiguous figure as the letter B, rather than as the number 13.

It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.13

The human mind is a messy place with few clear distinctions. You probably have a complex mix of both fixed and growth mindsets. I do. Untangling your mindsets can be a challenge. The good news is that you can change the fixed mindsets that you might discover lurking in your own theories about the nature of musical talent.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it. ~ H.G.Wells

In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows.

Fear is only as deep as the mind allows.

tried not to think about it, the more he actually thought about it. And the more he actually thought

Here's the truth: people, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain.

This kind of short-term state of mind is called affective happiness; it relates to affect, our momentary emotions.

A solid group of 100 or so [cognitive] biases has been repeatedly shown to exist,