The Hidden Brain Quotes

“Author compares the impact of biases to his experience as an average swimmer who overcame a considerable fear of water. While the swimming was easy in one particular experience, he was internally congratulating himself on his acquired skill. But when he realized he was swimming with a current he would now have to fight against, he realized just how definite his limits were.”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

“There is no use complaining about the hidden brain, or wishing it away. The telescope effect in our moral judgment is part of our nature. There is nothing we can do about it. But there is something we can do about our actions. We can choose to allow our actions to be guided by reason rather than instinct, choose to set up national and international institutions that respond instantly to humanitarian crises, rather than wait for our heartstrings to be pulled by stories of individual tragedy. If we rely on our moral telescopes, there will be people in a hundred years who ask how the world could have sat on its hands through so many genocides in the twenty-first century. Making”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and SaveOur Lives

“There might well be deep evolutionary reasons for these fears; it made sense, millennia ago, to fear situations where we had no control and situations that involved malevolent attackers. In our modern world, however, the things we really ought to fear are almost entirely of our own doing. Failing to climb the stairs and get enough exercise kills far more people than any number of murderers climbing those stairs. You are at far greater risk of taking your own life than being killed by a terrorist. If you were to go strictly by the numbers, that cigarette in your hand ought to have you screaming louder than a chance encounter with Hannibal Lecter.”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and SaveOur Lives

“For all the ways this book has shown how the rational mind is unequal to the machinations of the hidden brain, this is also a book that argues that reason is our only bulwark against bias.”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and SaveOur Lives