Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You Quotes

“Stress and anxiety influence our way of reducing the ambiguity of the world around us, as well as, therefore, our biases. Studies have shown that people with anxiety21 reduce the ambiguity of certain words in a more negative manner than others. If we ask someone with anxiety what the word “mug” means, they will have a tendency to answer it means to attack (as opposed to the more neutral synonym for “cup” or slang for “face”). This is what we call interpretation bias.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“Poincaré said: “To doubt everything or to doubt nothing are two equally convenient solutions, which both exempt us from thinking.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“It’s easier to teach someone who knows they know nothing than someone who believes they know while they don’t actually know.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“In the words of Umberto Eco, “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community […] but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“What depends on us must be perfect; as for the other things, take them as they come.” Epictetus”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“You see, there’s something frightening in this world: everyone has their reasons.” Jean Renoir, The Rules of the Game”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” Benjamin Disraeli, British statesman”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“the less people act, because they don’t feel as responsible than if they had been alone and that everything depended on them. This mechanism is called the bystander effect: I think that someone else will act, but that someone else will think the same, so in the end nobody acts. In”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“Influencing someone’s choice without them being aware of it (but without causing them harm) can therefore be in the common good. This method is called a nudge, and in this context, is a psychological prompting that gently influences human behaviour, supposedly for our own benefit.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“that women are worse at mathematics than men is widely spread, while a biological difference between genders which would justify a difference in mathematics capacity levels has never been observed. It is what we call a negative stereotype bias: we unconsciously attribute negative characteristics to a population group without any foundations.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“The Barnum Effect is therefore a bias that leads us to believe a statement that says something about our personality, and this due to three factors: because we think that the statement had been written especially for us (personalization bias); because the person addressing us is an authority figure (authority bias); finally because the statement is vague and general enough while being sufficiently positive to make us want to believe in it (selection bias).”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“when information contradicts your preferences, your convictions, your beliefs or your behaviours, you feel a state of tension which breaks your homeostasis. This state was theorized by Leon Festiger,30 an American psychologist, sixty years ago. He named it cognitive dissonance.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“Stress is therefore an essential function for all vertebrates because it privileges survival: if you’re in danger of death, it’s useless to invest energy into digestion or libido, or in combatting a virus.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“The human brain functions in a dimensional way, rather than a binary one. It would be less similar to a switch which only has on and off functions, than to the volume dial of a radio which can be gradually regulated.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“Gaslighting8 is another form of cognitive hijacking which leans on memory manipulation: it consists in making a victim doubt their memory or their actual mental health by presenting some facts in a truncated manner, editing a few elements of the original memory, telling them they’ve made it all up, or that they’re losing their mind. This form of emotional abuse can take many shapes.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“Some functions are nonetheless lateralized, in other words, lodged in one of the two hemispheres, but most are bilateral and therefore present in both hemispheres. It is for this reason that, with human beings as it is with monkeys, callosotomy doesn’t really affect brain function. Language is one of those aforementioned lateralized brain functions and is often located in the left hemisphere (there are “righties” and “lefties” when it comes to language lateralization in the brain).”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“Contrary to popular belief, we do not have a creative right brain and an analytical left brain, nor do we have an artistic right brain and a mathematical left brain.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“the world constantly reflects a multitude of signals, and we reduce their ambiguity by choosing what we want to see. Thus, little by little, our interpretation of the world shapes us psychologically, culturally and socially.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions

“human beings tend to blindly trust their perception, to the point of considering it to be shared by everyone.”
― Albert Moukheiber, Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions