Subliminal Quotes

“Evolution has provided us with an unconscious mind because our unconscious is what allows us to survive in a world requiring such massive information intake and processing.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“These subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play very little part in our daily lives. But they are the almost invisible roots of our conscious thoughts.”
― 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. 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. The human mind is designed to be both a scientist and an attorney, both a conscious seeker of objective truth and an unconscious, impassioned advocate for what we want to believe. Together these approaches vie to create our worldview.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“The fact that we assess information in a biased manner and are unaware we are doing so can be a real stumbling block in negotiations, even if both sides sincerely seek a fair settlement.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“ADJUSTING OUR STANDARDS for accepting evidence to favor our preferred conclusions is but one instrument in the subliminal mind’s motivated reasoning tool kit. Other ways we find support for our worldviews (including our view of ourselves) include adjusting the importance we assign to various pieces of evidence and, sometimes, ignoring unfavorable evidence altogether. For example, ever notice how, after a win, sports fans crow about their team’s great play, but after a loss they often ignore the quality of play and focus on Lady Luck or the referees?35 Similarly, executives in public companies pat themselves on the back for good outcomes but suddenly recognize the importance of random environmental factors when performance is poor.3”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“When we apply motivated reasoning to assessments about ourselves, we produce that positive picture of a world in which we are all above average. If we’re better at grammar than arithmetic, we give linguistic knowledge more weight in our view of what is important, whereas if we are good at adding but bad at grammar, we think language skills just aren’t that crucial. If we are ambitious, determined, and persistent, we believe that goal-oriented people make the most effective leaders; if we see ourselves as approachable, friendly, and extroverted, we feel that the best leaders are people-oriented. We even recruit our memories to brighten our picture of ourselves.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“A group of researchers asked ninety-nine college freshmen and sophomores to think back a few years and recall the grades they had received for high school classes in math, science, history, foreign language study, and English.44 The students had no incentive to lie because they were told that their recollections would be checked against their high school registrars’ records, and indeed all signed forms giving their permission. Altogether, the researchers checked on the students’ memories of 3,220 grades. A funny thing happened. You’d think that the handful of years that had passed would have had a big effect on the students’ grade recall, but they didn’t. The intervening years didn’t seem to affect the students’ memories very much at all—they remembered their grades from their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years all with the same accuracy, about 70 percent. And yet there were memory holes. What made the students forget? It was not the haze of years but the haze of poor performance: their accuracy of recall declined steadily from 89 percent for A’s to 64 percent for B’s, 51 percent for C’s, and 29 percent for D’s. So if you are ever depressed over being given a bad evaluation, cheer up. Chances are, if you just wait long enough, it’ll improve.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“As Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“In fact, studies show that the people with the most accurate self-perceptions tend to be moderately depressed, suffer from low self-esteem, or both. An overly positive self-evaluation, on the other hand, is considered normal and healthy.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Conscious thought is a great aid in designing a car or deciphering the mathematical laws of nature, but for avoiding snake bites or cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the speed and efficiency of the unconscious can save you.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe.”
― 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”
― 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. 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

“we are highly invested in feeling different from one another—and superior—no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being. You”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“In particular, what seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called “theory of mind,” or “ToM,” this ability gives humans a remarkable power to make sense of other people’s past behavior and to predict how their behavior will unfold given their present or future circumstances.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“while your unconscious mind is working feverishly to do all those things, you can relax in bed, recognizing, seemingly without effort, the lighting fixture on the ceiling—or the words in this book.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Deep concentration causes the energy consumption in your brain to go up by only about 1 percent. No matter what you are doing with your conscious mind, it is your unconscious that dominates your mental activity—and therefore uses up most of the energy consumed by the brain. Regardless of whether your conscious mind is idle or engaged, your unconscious mind is hard at work doing the mental equivalent of push-ups, squats, and wind sprints. O”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“That’s why doctors instinctively “package” themselves in nice shirts and ties and it’s not advisable for attorneys to greet clients in Budweiser T-shirts. In”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.15 I”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the “new unconscious,” to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurologist-turned-clinician named Sigmund Freud.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“CARL JUNG BELIEVED that to learn about the human experience, it was important to study dreams and mythology. History is the story of events that played out in civilization, but dreams and myths are expressions of the human heart. The themes and archetypes of our dreams and myths, Jung pointed out, transcend time and culture. They arise from unconscious instincts that governed our behavior long before civilization papered over and obscured them, and they therefore teach us about what it means to be human on the deepest level.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

“The researchers also investigated whether people will apply the social norms of politeness to computers. For example, when put in a position where they have to criticize someone face-to-face, people often hesitate or sugarcoat their true opinion. Suppose I ask my students, “Did you like my discussion of the stochastic nature of the”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior