Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I hate casinos. I have zero interest in gambling.
To the untrained eye, poker seems deceptively easy.
Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all.
Holmes serves as an ideal model of how we can learn to see and think better.
Much of the excitement about virtual reality has come from the gaming community.
Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic - the strong attacking the weak.
Our lives don't make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.
We tend to dismiss things we don't particularly like, or that we find disturbing, as aberrations.
No one is ever bias-free, but some people let their biases influence their actions more than others.
The name 'con artist' really does capture it. They're artists, and I have admiration for all artists.
Once fraternities became tied to power and leadership, the powerful and would-be-leaders wanted to join.
There will be great books. There will be great films. Sometimes, if we are lucky, the two will intersect.
Gender perception can be a pernicious thing: Where a lack of warmth passes in a male, in a woman, it's deadly.
Benign envy can sound a lot like admiration. The difference is that, while admiration feels good, envy is painful.
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.
Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.
Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.
The more extreme the story, the more successful it becomes. Emotions on high, empathy engaged, we become primed to help.
Play up the outrage factor and suddenly groups bond together like never before - and prepare to attack like never before.
Looking at scenes of nature, for even a short while, can help us become more insightful, more creative, and more productive.
It may be that learning to do creative work of any kind - not just direct imagery exercises - may help combat writer's block.
Cloud Atlas' is but one of a long list of titles deemed unfilmable, by author and movie moguls alike, until it was, well, filmed.
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.
But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.
People want to protect their way of life, and when they think it's in danger they start grasping for more extreme-seeming alternatives.
Down the road, the most controversial approach to neuroenhancement could be a way not of stimulating the brain but of reengineering it.
Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information - and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate.
The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.
One of the things that women really excel at is reading and reacting to subtle cues. We've always had to do that because men don't have to.
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.
The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.
Admiration is seen as a noble sentiment - we admire people for admiring others, detecting, in their admiration, a suggestion of taste and humility.
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.
Part of how easily we go to sleep is genetic: many sleep disturbances, ranging from insomnia to circadian disruption, have a large genetic component.
The fact that insomnia is associated with depression suggests that sleep might help us deal with emotionally stressful or otherwise disruptive events.
If we rush too quickly to be scientific, to begin our experiment or catch our criminal as soon as possible, we risk never getting to the answer at all.
Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.
Humans are startlingly bad at detecting fraud. Even when we're on the lookout for signs of deception, studies show, our accuracy is hardly better than chance.
It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.
That's the power of the good con artist: the ability to identify your deepest need and exploit it. It's not about honesty or greed; we are all suckers for belief.
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.
Light helps the body predict the future: it's a sign of how our environment will change in the coming hours and days, and our bodies prepare themselves accordingly.
Before the Internet, bullying ended when you withdrew from whatever environment you were in. But now, the bullying dynamic is harder to contain and harder to ignore.
How many thoughts float in and out of your head without your stopping to identify them? How many ideas and insights have escaped because you forgot to pay attention?
Three-card monte is one of the most persistent and effective cons in history. The games still pop up along city streets. But we tend to dismiss the victims as rubes.
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.
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.
Creating groups is easy - but to make them meaningful and lasting, you have to give them a common identity that not only unites them but shows them why they are unique.
When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general well-being suffers a palpable hit.