Quotes About Awareness

You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it.

We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, "without knowing how he knows." However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter.

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

A lot happened to you during the last second or two.

the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is now generally accepted.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality;

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. 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.

She did not forget about the meeting. She was completely focused on something else when the meeting was set and she just didn't hear you.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. 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.

Close your eyes.

puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.

two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People

when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "unknown unknowns

We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.

We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla "invisible" by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.

once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.

Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error.

We hold a single interpretation of the world around us at any one time, and we normally invest little effort in generating plausible alternatives to it. One interpretation is enough, and we experience it as true. We do not go through life imagining alternative ways of seeing what we see.

Our subjects were exposed to a series of rapidly flashing letters while they worked. They were told to give the task complete priority, but they were also asked to report, at the end of the digit task, whether the letter K had appeared at any time during the trial.

The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

there was no awareness, just a habitual connection between an attitude of rejection or acceptance and its common physical expression. You can see why the common admonition to "act calm and kind regardless of how you feel" is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.