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The brain so very vain that it even considers the letters that appear in your name to be more attractive than those that don’t.
world through the distorting lens of our brains.
There’s no great mystery to human emotions. All you need to know is one simple equation:8 EMOTION = AROUSAL + EMOTIONAL THOUGHTS Because the arousal is the same whatever the emotion – it varies only in intensity – your brain has the job of matching the arousal with the right thoughts.
the implication of the positive test strategy research is rather worrisome, suggesting as it does that many difficult choices in our lives, based on our inferences about ourselves and others, might perhaps have swung the other way if we had only considered them from the opposite angle.
The brain biases, evades, twists, discounts, misinterprets, even makes up evidence – all so that we can retain that satisfying sense of being in the right. It’s not only our long-cherished beliefs that enjoy such devoted loyalty from our brains. Even the most hastily formed opinion receives undeserved protection from revision.
Exactly the same experimental set-up reliably yields different results, depending on the beliefs of the researcher who is running the experiment and interacting with the participants. (In fact, even rats are susceptible to the expectations of experimenters.)
if someone asks you about a good friend and then asks you for a favour, you will be more willing to help. This is because thinking about friends unconsciously primes the goal to help, so one experiment found.
American researchers asked students to rate racist jokes using a Ha!Ha!-ometer, the students were suitably grudging with their Ha!Ha!’s. Yet students who were distracted while they rated the jokes (they had to do a demanding counting and memory task at the same time) found the racist jokes much funnier.
