What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite Quotes

“Loneliness, Cacioppo points out, has nothing to do with how many people are physically around us, but has everything to do with our failure to get what we need from our relationships.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Since the early days of studying propaganda used during World War II, psychology research has demonstrated that the more a message is repeated, the more likely we are to believe it—particularly if we are paying little attention.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“When we do a moral act to offset an immoral one, we are engaged in “moral cleansing.” When we do nothing, or perhaps something perceived as immoral (because we feel like we have enough in the moral bank account to get away with it) we are engaged in “moral licensing.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Since our brains are adept at finding and drawing conclusions from patterns, it's not surprising that coincidences captivate our attention.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“once we invest trust in a particular source of knowledge, we're less likely to scrutinize information from that source in the future.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The more focused we are on the message, the less likely we are to be influenced.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“For certainly, at the level of social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.” —WALTER LIPPMAN, PUBLIC OPINION”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“In one study, participants were primed with high-achievement words (related to winning, excellence, etc.) flashed on a computer screen. Each word appeared only for an instant, too fast for conscious deliberation. Participants with high-achievement motivation performed significantly better on tasks after being primed with the words than those with low achievement motivation.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“humans are born with brains structured to make sense of the world, and that often leads to beliefs that go beyond any natural explanation.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The truth, however, is that statistics lord over our lives every minute of every day. For the purposes of this discussion, suffice to say that all of us are the pawns of probability.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The study authors believe that when high achievers are primed to achieve excellence, the idea that a task is “fun” undercuts their desire to excel.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“It’s neater to believe that anger, for instance, launches from one central place than to accept that it doesn’t “live” in any single place in the brain but is rather the result of multiple brain regions cross-activating in less-than-tidy ways.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite: Updated and Revised

“One of the most perilous gene-meme double whammies that humans possess is the notion of certainty. Our natures and our learned biases lead us to believe that we are right whether or not we really are.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The meanings we give to patterns of coincidence originate and live solely in our minds and are then projected into the world.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Since memory is, as we discussed, more fallible”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“be empathetic, but we should be careful about being too empathetic too quickly.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“but it is very important that you do it.” 27. We are”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“but it is very important that you do it.” 27. We”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“to tell a friend that he is acting recklessly—and know we are risking the friendship—or just try to support him through a rough time and possibly preserve the friendship, there is no basic heuristic that will illuminate the way. The decision is case-specific, and the choices both have pros and cons that must be”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“deliberate practice—practice designed to develop mastery in the specific areas required by whatever role or position we are targeting.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Children who observe an adult intentionally manipulating an object have a strong tendency to encode all of the adult's actions as meaningful.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“A happy brain is happy to copy, and doing so is largely an automatic, as opposed to voluntary, response.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“activated when recalling a personal memory—the posterior cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, and left occipital lobe—are also active when thinking about a future event.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“we engage in something called episodic future thinking, which means that we simulate the future by using elements from the past.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“episodic future thinking, which means that we simulate the future by using elements from the past.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The results showed that the more times people were exposed to a photo of a completed action, the more often they thought they'd completed the action, even though they had really only imagined doing it.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Memory does not reside in any one place in our brains, but rather is distributed across multiple brain regions.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Our expectations for what we should be able to recall are hardly in line with what our brains are capable of processing—which, by the way, is an enormous amount.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“What we now know is that our brains happily reconstruct memories, though we are frequently fooled into thinking that the reconstructions are seamlessly recorded recollections.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Neurons that fire together wire together.” What this means in terms of memory is that the more intense the activity is between neurons constituting your memory of any given event, the more robust the memory will”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite