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

“intensity bias, which simply means that we are poor forecasters of our emotional reactions.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“When combined, the challenge to gain future perspective and the desire for immediate rewards sets us up for a range of problems. Economists call this tendency hyperbolic discounting.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Whenever we are presented with a commitment that is a long way off, our normal tendency is to downplay the commitment—particularly if an immediate reward is involved.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“I never think of the future—it comes soon enough.” —UNKNOWN”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“illusion of control to describe what happens when we place ourselves in the role of agent in a situation that truly lacks one.8 We tend to assume the role when something tragic happens to us or someone we love, and we think “If only I had…then this wouldn't have happened.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“intentional stance: we refer to objects both animate and inanimate as if they have minds as a shortcut to figuring out what is really going on.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“our brains are happy to fill in the blanks with causal relationships that don't really exist.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“the adaptive capabilities of our brains—like pattern recognition—did not evolve to make sense of complex commercial environments like those we live in.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“This compulsion to connect experiences, symbols, images, and ideas stems directly from the brain's vital function as an organ evolved to make sense of our environment.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“We have to appreciate that our brains weren't born yesterday. We have mechanisms to warn of threats and guard against instability because they have worked for a very long time.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“homeostasis—defined by renowned physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon as “the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Preestablished schemata guide our attention to evaluate new information, but they can also guide our attention to selectively ignore information inconsistent with the schemata.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“schema (singular form of schemata) is like a mental map of concepts that hangs together by association.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“tendency to seek confirming evidence and ignore disconfirming evidence as “confirmation bias,” and it's as human as sex, sleep, and barbeque.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“heuristics are simple, efficient rules—either hard-wired in our brains or learned—that kick in especially when we're facing problems with incomplete information.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“framing bias), defining it as the decision maker's conception of acts, outcomes, and contingencies associated with a particular choice.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The best way to think of how our brains frame information is to imagine a picture frame, except unlike a normal frame, this one obscures everything on the outside of the frame and magnetically draws attention to the inside.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“selective attention,” also called “selectivity bias”—the tendency to orient oneself toward and process information from only one part of our environment to the exclusion of other parts, no matter how obvious those parts may be.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The truth for us all is that when we feel right about a decision or a belief—whether big or small—our brains are happy.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“What this tells us is that the brain doesn't merely prefer certainty over ambiguity—it craves it. Our need to be right is actually a need to “feel” right.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“As the level of ambiguity increases, amygdalae activity continues to increase, and ventral striatum activity continues to decrease.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“the brain shows less activity in the ventral striatum, a part of the brain involved in our response to rewards”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“amygdalae filter through the information to determine its threat-level significance and mobilizes a response.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“even a small amount of ambiguity triggers increased activity in the amygdalae—two deep brain structures that play a major role in our response to threats.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Neuroscience research is revealing that the state of not being certain is an extremely uncomfortable place for our brains to live: The greater the uncertainty, the worse the discomfort.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The flip side of this reality is that our big brains, advanced as they are, come with an array of complex shortcomings and are also expert at transmitting these shortcomings.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“biological corollary to a meme is, of course, a gene, a unit of heredity transmitted from an organism to its offspring.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“meme simply as “that which is imitated.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Todd Essig: Brains don't want, any more than lungs sing or knees set long-jump records. Brains are part of what makes people want and how we want. There is always a situated, contextualized, enculturated person between the brain and wanting.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“When we speak of thought, we are speaking of the currency of mind—the very stuff of the brain's relentless activity.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite