Subliminal Quotes

“Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similiar to our won, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Says Bargh: „We all hold dear idea that we´re the captain of our own sould, and we´re in charge, and it´s a very scary feeling when we are not. In fact, that´s what psychosis is – the feeling of detachment from reality and that you are not in control, and that´s a very frightening feeling for anyone.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared.    —RUTH BENEDICT”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and our unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Kant said, there is Das Ding an sich, a thing as it is, and there is Das Ding für uns, a thing as we know it.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“the human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.9 However, anyone who has ever taken care of a few children who are all trying to talk to you at once can testify that your conscious mind cannot process anywhere near that amount. The actual amount of information we can handle has been estimated to be somewhere between sixteen and fifty bits per second.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Rosenthal went on to study precisely that – what expectation mean for our children. In one line of research he showed that teachers´ expectations greatly affect their students´ academic performance, even when the teachers try to treat them impartially. For example, he and a colleague asked schoolkids in eighteen classrooms to complete an IQ test. The teachers, but not students, were given results. The researchers told the teachers that the test would indicate which children had unusually high intellectual potential. What the teachers didn’t know was that the kids named as gifted did not really score higher than average on the IQ test – they actually had average scores. Shortly afterwards, the teachers rated those not labeled gifted as less curious and less interested than the gifted students – and the students´ subsequent grades reflected that.
But what is really shocking – and sobering – is the result of another IQ test, given eight months later. When you administer IQ test a second time, you expect that each child´s score will vary some. In general, about half of the children´s scores should go up and half down, as a result of changes in the individual’s intellectual development in relation to his peers or simply random variations. When Rosenthal administered the second test, he indeed found that about half the kids labeled “normal” showed a gain in IQ. But among those who´d been singled out as brilliant, he obtained a different result; about 80 % had an increase of at least 10 points. What´s more, about 20 % of the “gifted” group gained 30 or more IQ points, while only 5 % of the other children gained that many. Labeling children as gifted had proved to be a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily „The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.“ into Russian and then back to English. According to the story, it came out: „The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different.    —JAMES BORG I”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.    —ALBERT EINSTEIN I”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Though you are unaware of it, when you run cool wine over your tongue, you don’t just taste its chemical composition; you also taste its price.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“People seemed to “decide” how much to eat based on box size as much as taste.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Our brains are not simply recording a taste or other experience, they are creating it.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“but dreams and myths are expressions of the human heart.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn’t seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, “I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives,” you’d probably get a pretty strange look;”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“In 1932, after nineteen years of research, Bartlett published his results.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“We fill in blanks and make guesses, but the truth about us is far more complex and subtle than that which can be understood as the straightforward calculation of conscious and rational minds.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“According to the laws of chance, if you look around enough, you are bound to find something interesting.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“People think that their enjoyment of a product is based on the qualities of the product, but their experience of it is also very much based on the product’s marketing,”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“We all hold dear the idea that we’re the captain of our own soul, and we’re in charge, and it’s a very scary feeling when we’re not. In fact, that’s what psychosis is—the feeling of detachment from reality and that you’re not in control, and that’s a very frightening feeling for anyone.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“If you really want to understand the social world, if you really want to understand yourself and others, and, beyond that, if you really want to overcome many of the obstacles that prevent you from living your fullest, richest life, you need to understand the influence of the subliminal world that is hidden within each of us.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“except fMRI maps the activity of the brain’s different structures by detecting the blood flow that waxes and wanes, just slightly, as that activity varies. In this way fMRI offers three-dimensional pictures of the working brain, inside and out, mapping, to a resolution of about a millimeter, the level of activity throughout the organ.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“These technologies have made it possible, for the first time in human history, for there to be an actual science of the unconscious. That new science of the unconscious is the subject of this book.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“This was the first scientific demonstration that the unconscious mind possesses knowledge that escapes the conscious mind.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior