Quotes from How We Decide

“...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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, quote from How We Decide

“A lie told well is just as good as the truth.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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.)”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“When the mind is denied the emotional sting of losing , it never figures out how to win.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“Trusting one's emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“The world is more random than we can imagine. That's what our emotions can't understand.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the
profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests
$4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive
than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blaming
our feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting.
What we discover when we look at the brain is that the
horses and the charioteer depend upon each other. If it weren't
for our emotions, reason wouldn't exist at all.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“t. He decided to raise the next generation of baby
monkeys with two different pretend mothers. One was a wire
mother, formed out of wire mesh, while the other was a mother
made out of soft terry cloth. Harlow assumed that all things being
equal, the babies would prefer the cloth mothers, since they
would be able to cuddle with the fabric. To make the experiment
more interesting, Harlow added a slight twist to a few of the
cages. Instead of hand-feeding some babies, he put their milk bottles in the hands of the wire mothers. His question was simple:
what was more important, food or affection? Which mother
would the babies want more?
In the end, it wasn't even close. No matter which mother held
the milk, the babies always preferred the cloth mothers. The
monkeys would run over to the wire mothers and quickly sate
their hunger before immediately returning to the comforting folds
of cloth.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“the problem with statistics is that they
don't activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave
us cold: our minds can't comprehend suffering on such a massive
scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a
well but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every
year for lack of clean water. And why we donate thousands of
dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover
of a magazine but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda and
Darfur. As Mother Teresa put it, "If I look at the mass, I will
never act. If I look at the one, I will”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“But the physical health of these young monkeys hid a devastating
sickness: they had been wrecked by loneliness. Their short
lives had been defined by total isolation, and they proved incapable
of even the most basic social interactions. They would maniacally
rock back and forth in their metal cages, sucking on
their thumbs until they bled. When they encountered other monkeys,
they would shriek in fear, run to the corners of their cages,
and stare at the floor. If they felt threatened, they would lash out
in vicious acts of violence. Sometimes these violent tendencies
were turned inward. One monkey ripped out its fur in bloody
clumps. Another gnawed off its own hand. Because of their early
deprivation, these babies had to be isolated for the rest of their
lives.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“The moral of Harlow's experiment is that primate babies are born with an intense need for attachment. They cuddled with the cloth mothers because they wanted to experience the warmth and tenderness of a real mother. Even more than food, these baby monkeys craved the feeling of affection. "It's as if the animals are programmed to seek out love,”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“Colin Powell made a number of mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq war, but his advice to his intelligence officers was psychologically astute: "Tell me what you know," he told his advisers. "Then tell me what you don't know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on my dopamine neurons.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, quote from How We Decide

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Popular quotes

“El amor verdadero no era precisamente uno de esos absolutos; pregunta en la cual la palabra <>, sin embargo, tenía tanto que ver con la empleada por Kant o Hegel como la palabra <> con un descarrilamiento o un terremoto, con sus aullidos y su sangre. Bruno respondía que, a su juicio, la calidad del amor que hay entre dos seres que se quieren cambia de un instante a otro, haciéndose de pronto sublime, bajando luego hasta la trivialidad, convirtiéndose más tarde en algo afectuoso y cómodo, para repentinamente convertirse en un odio trágico o destructivo".”
― Ernesto Sabato, quote from On Heroes and Tombs

“Dealing with depression isn't about trying to run away from the feeling; it's about learning to walk alongside it.”
― Hannah Hart, quote from Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded

“All this happened, more or less.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Slaughterhouse-five: The Children's Crusade, A Duty-dance with Death

“As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken

“Kristin comes down the stairs, and the pressure on my chest snaps. I take a moment to turn away, inhaling deeply, blinking away tears. She sets the plate on a table behind the couch, and half tiptoes back up the stairs.

Thank god. I don’t think I could have handled maternal attention right this second. My body feels like it’s on a hair trigger.

I need to get it together. This is why people avoid me. Someone asks if I want a drink and I have a panic attack.

“You’re okay.” Declan is beside me, and his voice is low and soft, the way it was in the foyer. He’s so hard all the time, and that softness takes me by surprise. I blink up at him.

“You’re okay,” he says again.

I like that, how he’s so sure. Not Are you okay? No question about it.

You’re okay.

He lifts one shoulder in a half shrug. “But if you’re going to lose it, this is a pretty safe place to fall apart.” He takes two cookies from the plate, then holds one out to me. “Here. Eat your feelings.”

I’m about to turn him down, but then I look at the cookie. I was expecting something basic, like sugar or chocolate chip. This looks like a miniature pie, and sugar glistens across the top. “What . . . is that?”

“Pecan pie cookies,” says Rev. He’s taken about five of them, and I think he might have shoved two in his mouth at once. “I could live on them for days.”

I take the one Declan offered and nibble a bit from the side. It is awesome.

I peer up at him sideways. “How did you know?”

He hesitates, but he doesn’t ask me what I mean. “I know the signs.”

“I’m going to get some sodas,” Rev says slowly, deliberately. “I’m going to bring you one. Blink once if that’s okay.”

I smile, but it feels watery around the edges. He’s teasing me, but it’s gentle teasing. Friendly. I blink once.

This is okay. I’m okay. Declan was right.

“Take it out on the punching bag,” calls Rev. “That’s what I do.”

My eyes go wide. “Really?”

“Do whatever you want,” says Declan. “As soon as we do anything meaningful, the baby will wake up.”

Rev returns with three sodas. “We’re doing something meaningful right now.”

“We are?” I say.

He meets my eyes. “Every moment is meaningful.”

The words could be cheesy—should be cheesy, in fact—but he says them with enough weight that I know he means them. I think of The Dark and all our talk of paths and loss and guilt.

Declan sighs and pops the cap on his soda. “This is where Rev starts to freak people out.”

“No,” I say, feeling like this afternoon could not be more surreal. Something about Rev’s statement steals some of my earlier guilt, to think that being here could carry as much weight as paying respects to my mother. I wish I knew how to tell whether this is a path I’m supposed to be on. “No, I like it. Can I really punch the bag?”

Rev shrugs and takes a sip of his soda. “It’s either that or we can break out the Play-Doh”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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