What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite: Updated and Revised

The problem is that our penchant for connection-like many features of our brains-can get out of hand. When that happens, our brains quite literally make something out of nothing, and we can’t seem to stop ourselves from doing it

Some of the features she’ll experience include greatly reduced selective attention—no more missing the details! Broader framing—no more mental myopia! And information that challenges her beliefs can drive on in for an objective evaluation—no more confirmation bias! Plus, the Super Novum comes in a variety of colors and patterns to match its user’s

Psychologists refer to this tendency to seek confirming evidence and ignore disconfirming evidence as confirmation bias, and it’s as human as sex, sleep, and barbeque.

nonwarrior labor. The Spartans were not concerned with the principle of"freedom”—they were concerned with their own freedom.

The reason that Spartan men could devote themselves to becoming full-time professional warriors is that they had plenty of slaves for tending mundane,

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules-either hardwired in our brains or learned—that kick in especially when we’re facing problems with incomplete information.

selectivity bias-the tendency to orient oneself toward and process information from only one part of our environment to the exclusion of other parts, no matter how obvious those parts may be.

when we feel right about a decision or a belief-whether big or small-our brains are happy. Since our brains like being happy, we like feeling right. In

amygdalae feature prominently in this threat response.5 What this tells us is that the brain doesn’t merely prefer certainty over ambiguity-it craves it. Our need to be right is actually a need to “feel” right. Neurologist Robert Burton coined the term certainty bias to describe this feeling and how it skews our thinking.6