Jonah Lehrer Quotes

"We all silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance" (p. 207).

Trusting one's emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.

The world is more random than we can imagine. That's what our emotions can't understand.

Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new

Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.

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.

The benefit of such horizontal interactions - people sharing knowledge across fields - is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.

Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.

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.

A lie told well is just as good as the truth.

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?

Suffering through his classes, the young Igor steeped himself in angst. He would later describe his childhood as 'a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” [Charlan] Nemeth [a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley] says. “It wakes us right up.

To have a style is to be stuck.