More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You think you know how the world works, but you really don’t. You move through life forming opinions and cobbling together a story about who you are and why you did the things you did leading up to reading this sentence, and taken as a whole it seems real.
From the greatest scientist to the most humble artisan, every brain within every body is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought that lead it astray without the brain knowing
you tend to look for information that confirms your beliefs and ignore information that challenges them. This is called confirmation bias.
You are always of two minds at any one moment—the higher-level rational self and the lower-level emotional self.
The emotional brain, the unconscious mind, is old, powerful, and no less a part of who you are than the rational brain is, but its function can’t be directly observed or communicated to consciousness. Instead, the output is mostly intuition and feeling. It is always there in the background co-processing your mental life. Lehrer’s central argument is “you know more than you know.” You make the mistake of believing only your rational mind is in control, but your rational mind is usually oblivious to the influence of your unconscious. In this book I add another proposition: You are unaware of how
...more
You are always drifting back and forth between the influence of emotion and reason, automaticity and executive orders.
you often invent narratives to explain your feelings and decisions and musings because you aren’t aware of the advice you’ve been given by the mind behind the curtain in your head.
When you recall your past, you create it on the spot—a daydream part true and part fantasy that you believe down to the last detail.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett calls seeing yourself in this way heterophenomenology. Basically, he suggests when you explain why you feel the way you do, or why you behaved as you did, to take it with a grain of salt, as if you were listening to someone tell you about their night out.
Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things.
The study suggests even in your memories you fall prey to confirmation bias, recalling those things that support even recently-arrived-at beliefs and forgetting those things that contradict them.
Thinking about thinking—this is the key.
You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is the you some time in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires; a you for whom an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality.
Much of your behavior is an attempt to lower anxiety. You know you aren’t in any danger when everything is safe and expected.
They said you have a tendency to first interpret the situation within the context of what you are familiar with and to greatly underestimate the severity. This is the moment, when seconds count, that normalcy bias costs lives.
THE MISCONCEPTION: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.
the act of introspection can sometimes lead you to make decisions that look good on virtual paper but leave you emotionally lacking.
When you ask people why they do or do not like things, they must then translate something from a deep, emotional, primal part of their psyche into the language of the higher, logical, rational world of words and sentences and paragraphs. The problem here is those deeper recesses of the mind are perhaps inaccessible and unconscious.
Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion. You believe you know yourself and why you are the way
The less you know about a subject, the 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.
The more skilled you are, the more practice you’ve put in, the more experience you have, the better you can compare yourself to others. As you strive to improve, you begin to better understand where you need work. You start to see the complexity
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
When you connect the dots in your life in a way that tells a story, and then you interpret the story to have a special meaning, this is true apophenia.
J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, Littlewood’s Miscellany. He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood’s Law.
men will defend their ego no matter how slight the insult.
THE MISCONCEPTION: When you can’t explain something, you focus on what you can prove. THE TRUTH: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.
There is a pleasant sense of wonder that can fill your heart when you take in the natural world and realize how much you don’t know.
Lack of proof neither confirms nor denies a proposition.
THE MISCONCEPTION: When you argue, you try to stick to the facts. THE TRUTH: In any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent’s position.
