Quotes About Perception

you think with your body, not only with your brain.

Any aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation. This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question.

But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.

costs are not losses.

single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

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

Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.

automatic search for causes shapes our thinking

The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2. This is how you will proceed when you next encounter the Müller-Lyer illusion. When you see lines with fins pointing in different directions, you will recognize the situation as one in which you should not trust your impressions of length.

Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that

People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness.

System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.

Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there. You cannot trace how you came to the belief that there is a lamp on the desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation in your spouse's voice on the telephone, or how you managed to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.

intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Here we encounter a new aptitude of System 1. An underlying scale of intensity allows matching across diverse dimensions. If crimes were colors, murder would be a deeper shade of red than theft. If crimes were expressed as music, mass murder would be played fortissimo while accumulating unpaid parking tickets would be a faint pianissimo.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence.

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.

we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability

People voted for someone who looked strong and decisive without any other reason to believe that he was.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They