You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

Your brain is better at seeing the world in some ways, like social situations, and not so good in others, like logic puzzles with numbered cards.

you tend to look for information that confirms your beliefs and ignore information that challenges them.

In this place, consciousness drifts as one mental task goes into autopilot and the rest of the mind muses about less insipid affairs, floating away into the umbra.

Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave.

You can prime the emotions of your guests with how you set the mood when hosting a party.

You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve.

Just as the brain fills in your blind spot every moment of the day without your consciously noticing, so do you fill in the blind spots in your memory and your reasoning.

You feel like a single person with a single brain, but in many ways, you really have two.

Oddly enough, your right hand is controlled by your left brain and your left hand by the right.

You are a story you tell yourself.

You don’t know. You just thought it. How your mind works is something you can never access, and although you often believe you understand your thoughts and actions, your emotions and motivations, much of the time you do not.

You want to take a nap on a rainy afternoon because perhaps your ancestors sought shelter and safety in the same conditions.

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.

People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things.

you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

You are always looking back at the person you used to be, always reconstructing the story of your life to better match the person you are today. You have needed to keep a tidy mind to navigate the world ever since you lived in jungles and on savannas. Cluttered minds got bogged down, and the bodies they controlled got eaten.

With all three examples there are thousands of differences, all of which you ignored, but when you draw the bull’s-eye around the clusters, the similarities—whoa.

When reality shows are filmed, the producers have hundreds of hours of footage. When they condense that footage into an hour, they paint a bull’s-eye around a cluster of holes. They find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos. Was that one girl really a horrific bitch? Was that guy with the gelled hair and fake tan really that dumb?

More often than not, cancer clusters have no scary environmental cause. There are many agents at work. People who are related tend to live near one another. Old people tend to retire in the same areas. Eating, smoking, and exercise habits tend to be similar region to region. And, after all, one in three people will develop cancer in his or her lifetime. To accept that things like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist.

Order makes it easier to be a person,

When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.

some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.

If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.

Weather experts and emergency management workers know you can become enveloped in a blanket of calm when terror enters your heart.

He says about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a catastrophic event or impending doom.

the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time.

through a procedure before the body acts—cognition, perception, comprehension, decision, implementation, and then movement. There’s no way to overclock this,

To suddenly stop moving and hope for the best is called fear bradycardia, and it is an automatic and involuntarily instinct.

Much of your behavior is an attempt to lower anxiety.

Hurricanes and floods, for example, can be too big, slow, and abstract to startle you into action.

If enough warnings are given and enough instructions are broadcast, then those things become the new normal, and you will spring into action.

“Forming preferences is akin to riding a bicycle; we can do it easily but cannot easily explain how.”

Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion.

The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.

You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories.

When alone, people took about five seconds to get up and freak out. Within groups people took an average of 20 seconds to notice.

The findings suggest the fear of embarrassment plays into group dynamics.

When it’s just you, all the responsibility to help is yours.

people rush to help once they see another person leading by example.

“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.

amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are.

Education is as much about learning what you don’t know as it is about adding to what you do.

Just as with television and film, your memory tends to delete the boring parts and focus on the highlights—the plot points.

You need a sense of meaning to get out of bed, to push forward against the grain. Just remember that meaning comes only from within.

So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else’s, hesitate. Because you’re not trying to change the other person’s mind—you’re trying to prop up your own.

those who are held in high regard can cause a lot of damage when no one is willing to question their authority.

this is when you decide something is true or false because you can’t find evidence to the contrary.

You don’t know what the truth is, so you assume any explanation is as good as another. Maybe those lights were alien spacecraft, maybe not. You don’t know, so you think the likelihood they were intergalactic visitors is roughly the same as those lights being from a helicopter far away.

You can’t disprove something you don’t know ...