Book Titles

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.

We tend to forget that our brains are talented forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling that its inauthenticity is rarely detected.

It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention – difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering – and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.

When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to a make a variety of mistakes.

Underestimating the novelty of the future is a time-honored tradition.

…most of us have a hard time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today, and we find it particularly difficult to imagine that we will ever think, want, or feel differently than we do now.

Curiosity is a powerful urge, but when you aren’t smack-dab in the middle of feeling it, it’s hard to imagine just how far and fast it can drive you.

…how we feel when we imagine an event is usually a good indicator of how we will feel when the event itself transpires.

…when people are prevented from feeling an emotion in the present, they become temporarily unable to predict how they will feel in the future.

Future events may request access to the emotional areas of our brains, but current events almost always get the right of way.