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

“brains are not static hunks of tissue but flexible and adaptive organs that change throughout our lives. The term used to describe this new understanding is brain plasticity.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“most views, short-term memory has extremely limited capacity—about seven items at a time. Long-term memory includes anything that is not currently active but could be recalled and made active.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The second category is long-term memory—the place where everything “remembered” resides. Long-term memory is engaged in the short term (e.g., word memorization) and in the long term (e.g., childhood memories).”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The first is working memory, or what we usually call “short-term memory”—the category of memory that includes anything we are actively thinking about right now.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Explicit memory (also called declarative memory) principally holds words, numbers, and events. Or, to use the parlance of neurobiology, it is memory that's semantic and episodic. When we are trying to remember what happened on the camping trip we took with our in-laws in late 2004, for example, explicit memory is engaged.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Implicit memory (also called nondeclarative memory) is where socalled muscle memory is found—the motor skills that, once learned, are always available to us. How is it that you never have to remember how to clip your nails or brush your teeth? Because implicit memory has you covered.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Our memories are wrong at least as often as they are right. At best, they are incomplete, though we might swear otherwise.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“use of concrete language strongly correlates with a sense of social closeness, whereas abstract language correlates with social distance.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Subjects holding the warm beverage had a significantly higher level of perceived closeness to the individual they selected than subjects holding the cold beverage, bearing out the hypothesis that physical warmth is tied to perception of social “warmth.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“psychologists call embodied cognition—the hypothesis that bodily perceptions, like touch, strongly influence how we think.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The results again showed that people holding heavy clipboards assumed stronger, more polarized positions than those holding light clipboards, and made significantly stronger arguments in defense of the positions.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“embodied cognition—the hypothesis that bodily perceptions, like touch, strongly influence how we think.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“empathize much more with those familiar to us, and this familiarity bias is demonstrated in something as basic as yawning.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“yawns are contagious for the same reason that smiles, frowns, and other facial expressions are contagious: They are a measure of empathy, and—here's the fun part—empathy is biased.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“They discovered that chimpanzees yawn more after watching familiar chimps yawn than after watching strangers yawn.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“suggests that blaming someone in public is the psychological equivalent of coughing swine flu into a crowd.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“it appears that anxietylaced sweat influences riskier behavior than normal sweat.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.” —ERIC HOFFER, THE PASSIONATE STATE OF MIND”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“In German, bridge (die brucke) is a feminine noun; in Spanish, bridge (el puente) is a masculine noun. Boroditsky found that when asked to describe a bridge, native German speakers used words like beautiful, elegant, slender. When native Spanish speakers were asked the same question, they used words like strong, sturdy, towering.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“These studies suggest that we invest the most confidence in a message when it has been repeated three to five times.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The reason that persuasive messages are short, pithy, and digestible in seconds is that we process them so quickly that they become familiar without us even noticing.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Cognitive fluency refers to our brains’ tendency to accept messages that are easy to understand and effortlessly fit into existing schemata (referring back to chapter 1)—and, when positively employed, it is a skill crucial to learning.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“As a social animal, we have a deeply rooted desire to belong to a social group—a preferred tribe, if you will.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Adolescence is nothing if not a working model of peer influence in its purest form.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“We are instead an exceptionally social species wired for interdependence.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“neuroscience research—has been providing evidence that “independent thought” is certainly not absolute, and possibly a figment of our egos’ making.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Regret as a learning tool happens through something called counterfactual thinking—a dynamic with two razor-sharp edges.5 When we look back on a decision and think, If I had done A instead of B, then I wouldn't have to deal with horrible C, we are engaging in counterfactual thinking.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“when you really want something but are prevented from getting it, you want it all the more.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Newness” has a sort of mystical draw, even though it's incredibly short-lived and rarely meets expectations”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Not by coincidence is the divorce rate for second marriages higher than it is for first marriages; attempting to recapture the anticipation of reward simply sets off a new cycle of habituation and regret.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite