Jonah Lehrer Quotes

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.

In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on.

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.

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

...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.

As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

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.

"As Tetlock writes, "The dominant danger [for pundits] remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilities too quickly.

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.

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.

The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.

"There is a presence in what is missing." That presence is our own.

"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,

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