Quotes About Thinking

identifying, categorizing, interpreting, describing, and thinking about works of art.

Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!

Sexiness, particularly in movies, is the chess game in the 'Thomas Crown Affair'. It's, it's, I don't know, but Faye Dunaway comes up a lot in that thinking. It's the subtlety of sexiness. The moment you try to be sexy, then it's not.

correctly reprogramming the brain is more than reminding yourself to think happy thoughts. I prefer that you adopt a mindset of "accurate thinking" with a positive or optimistic can-do spin to stay in the right frame of mind—happy. However, that's not easy to do because the default setting on the brain—set back in prehistoric times—is negativity.

Rule #2. Drink plenty of water and don't drink your calories. Your brain is 80 percent water. Anything that dehydrates it, such as too much caffeine or alcohol, decreases your thinking and impairs your judgment. Make sure you get plenty of water every day. To know you are drinking enough water for your brain, a good general rule is to consume half your weight

As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience—as soon as we have a stake in its goodness—our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.

not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor.

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.

When feeling is for thinking and thinking is for doing, regret is for making us better.

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model," Ressler told me. "No matter what kind of business you're in, it's time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.

Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose—and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. "We need to flip that model," Ressler told me. "No matter what kind of business you're in, it's time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks and outdated, industrial-age thinking.

But abundance has produced an ironic result: the very triumph of L-Directed Thinking has lessened its significance. The prosperity it has unleashed has placed a premium on less rational, more R-Directed sensibilities—beauty, spirituality, emotion.

Storytelling doesn't replace analytical thinking," he says. "It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds…. Abstract analysis is easier to understand when seen through the lens of a well-chosen story."5 Now Denning is spreading his message—and telling his story—to organizations worldwide.

According to Goleman, IQ can influence the profession one enters. My IQ, for instance, is way too low for a career in astrophysics. But within a profession, mastery of L-Directed Thinking matters relatively little. More important are qualities that are tougher to quantify, the very kinds of high-concept and high-touch abilities I've been mentioning—imagination, joyfulness, and social dexterity.

Indeed, the very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we'll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don't believe that anymore. Sometimes these motivators work. Often they don't. And many times, they inflict collateral damage. In short, the new way economists think about what we do is hard to reconcile with Motivation 2.0.

Utility is akin to L-Directed Thinking; significance is akin to R-Directed Thinking. And, as with those two thinking styles, today utility has become widespread, inexpensive, and relatively easy to achieve—which has increased the value of significance.

The differences in the two thinking styles, as Baron-Cohen describes them, are intriguing. "Systematizing involves exactness, excellent attention to local detail," and an attraction to fixed rules independent of context, he says. "To systematize, you need detachment." 21 (Baron describes autism as an "extreme" male brain.)

Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.

Critical thinking doesn't mean we disparage everything; it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.

We make a number of reasoning errors due to cognitive biases.

To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called "engaged." They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.