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there is a sizable patch in the retina where the photoreceptors are missing.
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.
awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations.
This effect is called priming: your brain has been primed like a pump.
illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.
Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
Sigmund Freud noted that arguments stemming from the intellect or from morality are weak when pitted against human passions and desires,20 which is why campaigns to “just say no” or practice abstinence will never work.
Freely made decisions that bind you in the future are what philosophers call a Ulysses contract.
Stroop interference unmasks the clash between the strong, involuntary and automatic impulse to read the word and the unusual, deliberate, and effortful task demand to state the color of the print.38
If you sit up straight instead of slouching, you’ll feel happier.
The concept and word to replace blameworthiness is modifiability, a forward-looking term that asks, What can we do from here?
The critical take-home lesson is that invisibly small changes inside the brain can cause massive changes to behavior.
You inherit a genetic blueprint and are born into a world over which you have no choice throughout your most formative years. This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making.
This is because of a feature known as emergence.27 When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.
What is it about observation? Do human minds interact with the stuff of the universe?
If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.
