Daniel Gilbert Quotes

People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.

No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It’s a system that’s supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That’s how the system guides you through the world.

The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its on fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you ever make a fist?

The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.

Daniel Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The organized Mind is smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.

Humans react to danger when it is immediate, immoral, visible… Global warming does not press any of those buttons.

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.