"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 … - Jonah Lehrer

...the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

"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

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.