Top 45 Maria Konnikova Quotes

Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.

The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.

Electrodes aren’t the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.

I don’t think anyone could have predicted that I would have gone in less than a year from not knowing how many cards were in a deck to winning a major poker title.

The last thing in the world I want to do is write something in memory of Walter Mischel. I still can’t quite accept that he’s gone. And so I procrastinate, and with every day I don’t put pen to paper, I reinforce his life’s work with my reluctance.

Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic – the strong attacking the weak.

Las vegas shouldn’t exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.

While today’s fraternities are hardly the literary- and debate-inspired groups of yore, their core mission – or, at the least, their ideal core mission and the one touted loudly in their public chapter and promotional materials – remains largely unchanged.

In the world of speeches and orations, especially historical ones, the persistent misquotation is understandable. You hear a speech. You misremember or mishear a line as something more colorful than it was.

The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all.

Where anger can be seen as a relative positive in a man, it is hardly ever perceived as anything other than a negative in a woman.

We’ve progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven’t satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Much of the excitement about virtual reality has come from the gaming community.

We don’t remember everything that happens to us on a given day: sometimes, we remember something simply because it’s emotional, while, at other times, we work our way through mundane details to figure out why something matters.

Writer’s block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.

For as long as writers have written, they’ve had second thoughts about their work.

Cloud Atlas’ is but one of a long list of titles deemed unfilmable, by author and movie moguls alike, until it was, well, filmed.

The fact that insomnia is associated with depression suggests that sleep might help us deal with emotionally stressful or otherwise disruptive events.

Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We’re in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can’t be real.

I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.

There will be great books. There will be great films. Sometimes, if we are lucky, the two will intersect.

As our understanding of fraud evolves, we might one day be able to develop predictive algorithms that could identify would-be con artists based on patterns of behavior.

The truth is that we have no idea what the long-term effects of any artificial enhancement may be. Will our brains be able to withstand running at artificially heightened capacity?

Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.

Perhaps one day we’ll be able to identify and block not just scams but the scammers themselves – before they even target their first victim.

Before I found out what poker really was I had this picture in my mind of men smoking cigars and having all these chips and like going all macho and crazy. I don’t think there’s been that much done in the mainstream community to change that perspective.

To the untrained eye, poker seems deceptively easy.

Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.

Our lives don’t make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.

A wide array of factors can determine just how quickly you’ll be able to drift off to sleep when you choose to do so.

I really had to go back and remind myself that trusting makes society function on an individual level related to health and on a social level related to economic growth and development.

I’ve been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I’m between events and in New York, I’m reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.

Virtual reality has already proved useful in treating phobias and PTSD. It can help people overcome a fear of heights, for example, through simulations of standing on a balcony or walking across a bridge.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately – and paradoxically – an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

We don’t appreciate luck in life when things are going well. No matter how smart I am and how I prepare, there are things that catch you off guard.

An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.

Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.

In real life, having your poetry criticized by T.S. Eliot could cause you to doubt your poetic gifts. But imagining it in a dream has the opposite effect. That dream could become the source for a story.

Understanding the psychology of changing norms starts from a simple insight: although we may wish to be perfectly rational and impartial, bias is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.

Part of how easily we go to sleep is genetic: many sleep disturbances, ranging from insomnia to circadian disruption, have a large genetic component.

Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren’t true.

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds.