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1 " How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain. "
― Jonah Lehrer , How We Decide
2 " A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. (The subjects were well compensated, at least by undergraduate standards.) "
3 " ...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time. "
4 " A lie told well is just as good as the truth. "
5 " Harlow would later write, "If monkeys have taught us anything, it's that you've got to learn how to love before you learn how to live. "
6 " Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But don't try to analyze the information with your conscious mind. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice. "
7 " People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better. "
8 " Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process. "
9 " The world is more random than we can imagine. That's what our emotions can't understand. "
10 " When the mind is denied the emotional sting of losing , it never figures out how to win. "
11 " For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blamingour feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting.What we discover when we look at the brain is that thehorses and the charioteer depend upon each other. If it weren'tfor our emotions, reason wouldn't exist at all. "
12 " Trusting one's emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice. "
13 " Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated. "
14 " Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on my dopamine neurons. "
15 " When you overthink at the wrong moment, you cut yourself off from the wisdom of your emotions, which are much better at assessing actual preferences. You lose the ability to know what you really want. And then you choose the worst strawberry jam. "
16 " The mind is made out of used parts, engineered by a blind watchmaker. The result is that the uniquely human areas of the mind depend on the primitive mind underneath. The process of thinking requires feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent. "
17 " We all silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance" (p. 207). "
18 " As Tetlock writes, "The dominant danger [for pundits] remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilities too quickly. "
19 " Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide theprofits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests$4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receivethan if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested? "
20 " Disappointment is educational "
