The Misconception: You are rational, logical and a product of evolution. The Truth: You are irrational, illogical and a culmination of evolution.David McRaney
You move through life forming opinions and cobbling together a story about who you are and why you did the things you did, deciding others were helpful or harmful, guessing at the reasons for their behavior and their intentions, and you make the assumption that your beliefs, your feelings, your prejudices, are universal.David McRaney
You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don't know the answers.David McRaney
In the same way you fold an origami Flapping Bird with your mind, you unknowingly construct reality until it matches your expectations, often blinding yourself in the process.David McRaney
The greatest damage comes when you assume others either are or should be like you.David McRaney
You don’t see the world as it is, but as you are.David McRaney
You Are Not So Smart is not really about dumb people. It’s about us. All of us.David McRaney
The brain treats opinions and beliefs differently from facts. It likes to hold on to beliefs and confirm them, to keep everything making sense.David McRaney
Just like remembering, problem-solving can be subject to priming, which is scary once you realize so much of your opinions and behavior are based on the situations in which they were formed, the frames you placed around them.David McRaney
Once something is added to your collection of known things, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively, without thought or need for instructions. The phenomenon is known as the conservatism bias.David McRaney
Confronted with three choices, two of which are similar but clearly wrong, you are more likely to choose the different option.David McRaney
Whenever you feel a compulsion to perpetuate a tradition or fight against a change to your environment, realize that your brain is trying to reset the world so it resembles the state in which it learned how to survive.David McRaney