psychology

Think of imagination as a kind of essential mental space in your attic, where you have the freedom to work with various contents but don’t yet have to commit to any storage or organizational system, where you can shift and combine and recombine and mess around at will and not be afraid of disturbing the main attic’s order or cleanliness in any way.

They sneak in if we’re not careful, if we just passively take in information and don’t make a conscious effort to control our attention (something we’ll learn about a bit further on)—especially if they are things that somehow pique our attention naturally: topics of general interest; things we can’t help but notice; things that raise some emotion

A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.

When monkeys are trained to differentiate between the different orientation and size of shapes, their judgement is impacted by the presence of a decoy stimulus, such as one that’s clearly smaller than the target shape, helping to reinforce their decision.

Research conducted at Bar-Ilan University in Israel on the rejection-then-retreat technique shows that if the first set of demands is so extreme as to be seen as unreasonable, the tactic backfires. In such cases, the party who has made the extreme first request is not seen to be bargaining in good faith. Any subsequent retreat from that wholly

Endorphins and anandamide, our final two pleasure chemicals, are pain-killing bliss producers. They’re both heavy-duty stress relievers, replacing the weight of the everyday with a euphoric sense of relaxed happiness.

Even in recorded history we find so many instances of goodness, even of nobility, that we can forgive, though not forget, the sins. The gifts of charity have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails.

Kaczynski had made lightly; he’d developed an entire philosophy to justify it. Influenced by techno-dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley and Jacques Ellul, Kaczynski believed the Industrial Revolution had turned society into a cold process of production and consumption that was gradually crushing everything humans valued most: freedom, happiness,

The disagreeable prospect of serving time seems remote so long as he can gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of sports figures, movie and TV stars and politicians.