Quotes About Perception

Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.

As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

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.

A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.

declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.

wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think.

You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.

the pupil of the eye as a window to the soul.

Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.

you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.

You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.

his pupils widening as he watched beautiful nature pictures, and it ends with two striking pictures of the same good-looking woman, who somehow appears much more attractive in one than in the other. There is only one difference: the pupils of the eyes appear dilated in the attractive picture and constricted in the other.

There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.

Our mind has a useful capability to focus spontaneously on whatever is odd, different, or unusual.

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.

The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us.