Leonard Mlodinow

“The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data. Nature “The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data. Nature helps us overcome gaps in information by supplying a brain that smooths over the imperfections, at an unconscious level, before we are even aware of any perception.”187

“Even when the entire syllable “gis” in “legislatures” was obliterated by the cough, subjects could not identify the missing sound.26 The effect is called phonemic restoration, and it’s conceptually analogo” 179

“Phonemic restoration has a striking property: because it is based on the context in which you hear words, what you think you heard at the beginning of a sentence can be affected by the words that come at the end. For example, letting an asterisk. 182

“the price of the wine increased activity in an area of the brain behind the eyes called the orbitofrontal cortex, a region that has been associated with the experience of pleasure.25 So though the two wines were not different, their taste difference was real, or at least the subjects’ relative enjoyment of the taste was.”

“People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similar to our own, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete” 67
“form of information is difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgments about the substance of that information. 77

“people would pay 40 to 61 percent more for an item of junk food if, rather than choosing from a text or image display, they were presented with the actual item.19 The study also found that if the item is presented behind Plexiglas, rather than being available for you to simply grab, your willingness to pay sinks back down to the text and image levels.” 80

“In the wine study, four French and four German wines, matched for price and dryness, were placed on the shelves of a supermarket in England. French and German music were played on alternate days from a tape deck on the top shelf of the display. On days when the French music played, 77 percent of the”

“buy, but when asked whether the music had influenced their choice, only one shopper in seven said it had.2”

“he resulting images showed that the price of the wine increased activity in an area of the brain behind the eyes called the orbitofrontal cortex, a region that has been associated with the experience of pleasure.25 So though the two wines were not different, their taste difference was real, or at least the subjects’ relative enjoyment of the taste was. 87“orbitofrontal cortex, called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or VMPC, is “the seat of warm, fuzzy feelings such as those we experience when we contemplate a familiar brand-name product.26 In 2007, researchers recruited” 90
Our Brian’s don’t simply “recording a taste or other experience, they are creating  92
“the image you see is based not only on her optical qualities but also on what is going on in your head—for example, your thoughts about her bizarre child-rearing practices or whether it was a good idea to agree to live next door.” 111

“The same sensory experiences emanating from the football field, transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain … gave rise to different experiences in different people.… There is no such ‘thing’ as a game existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’ ”782
“t when assessing emotionally relevant data, our brains automatically include our wants and dreams and desires.29”

“something, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and a thousand unanimous scientific studies can all converge on a single conclusion, and people will still find a reason to disbelieve.That’s exactly what happened in the case of the inconvenient and costly issue of global climate change. The organizations I named above, plus a thousand academic articles on the topic, were unanimous in concluding that human activity is responsible, yet in the United States”799“2.

Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science 306 (December 3, 2004): 1686, and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 169–70.”“we perceive ourselves as forming judgments in a bottom-up fashion, using data to draw a conclusion, while we are in reality deciding top-down, using our preferred conclusion to shape our analysis of the data.”821