Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

A preference for extraversion (seeing life in terms of the external world) or introversion (greater interest in the inner world of ideas) is independent of your preferences for sensing, thinking, intuition, and feeling.

We are actually programmed to get satisfaction and pleasure from discovery and creativity, he says, because its results lead to our survival as a species.

They may camouflage their true feelings in ingenious ways: To show that they are not vain, they may purposely pay less attention to dress or be overly modest.

Frankl’s brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots.

we change the course of our actions according to what we learn is good for our survival.

we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around.

Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack.

The lateral thinking concept emerged from de Bono’s study of how the mind works. He found that the brain is not best understood as a computer; rather, it is “a special environment which allows information to organize itself into patterns.” The mind continually looks for patterns, thinks in terms of patterns, and is self-organizing, incorporating new information in terms of what it already knows.

Burns notes the catch-22 nature of depression: The worse we feel, the more distorted our thoughts become, and this thinking plunges us even lower into black feelings about ourselves.

The behaviorist view was that babies — monkey or human — loved their mothers for the milk that they provided, since this satisfied a primary need. But what Harlow had seen with the cloth pads made him wonder whether babies might love their mothers not for their milk only, but because they provided warmth and affection.

Instead of trying to find out what goes on inside a person’s head (“mentalism”), to know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way.

The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression.

Before turning his mind to creativity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Chick-sent-me-hi) wrote a celebrated book called Flow. Its insight was that it is a mistake to pursue happiness itself. Rather, we should recognize when we are genuinely happy — what we are doing when we feel powerful and “true” — and do more of those things.

By the laws of probability, most decisions made under pressure should be flawed ones, yet psychologists have found that people routinely make correct judgments most of the time, even with limited information.