Quotes About Mind

scholars—scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.

Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise.

If you think that you can control your emotions, think that some people also believe that they can control their heartbeat or hair growth.)

the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.

Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

perception of causation has a biological foundation.

Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.

Our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability.

the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.

we are likely to unwittingly simplify the problem because our minds routinely do so without our knowing it.

Monsieur de Norpois is made to be ashamed of the fact that he expressed a different opinion. Proust did not consider that the diplomat might have changed his mind. We

You can effortlessly look up accident statistics on the Web, but they do not easily come to mind. Note

focusing, rather, on the precise and vivid events that easily come to our minds.

our actions are not quite guided by the parts of our brain that dictate rationality. We think with our emotions and there is no way around it.

I am convinced of that after spending almost all my adult and professional years in a fierce fight between my brain (not Fooled by Randomness) and my emotions (completely Fooled by Randomness) in which the only success I've had is in going around my emotions rather than rationalizing them.

trusting that Nero would be able to read his mind.

The problem lies in the structure of our minds:

mi heurística me sugiere que cuanto más pagano sea alguien, más brillante es su mente, y mayor capacidad tiene para gestionar matices y ambigüedades.

I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability

Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias.

The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As

without being conscious of it.

Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten too, what we've tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly

Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?