Book Titles

…one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.

Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective.

Reasoning by metaphor is an ingenious technique that allows us to remedy our weaknesses by capitalizing on our strengths – using things we can visualize to think, talk, and reason about things we can’t.

Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.

Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience.

Starting points matter because we often end up close to where we started.

Our sensitivity to relative rather than absolute magnitudes is not limited to physical properties such as weight, brightness, or volume. It extends to subjective properties, such as value, goodness, and worth as well.

The human brain is not particularly sensitive to the absolute magnitude of stimulation, but it is extraordinarily sensitive to differences and changes – that is, to the relative magnitude of stimulation.

Because the subjective value of a commodity is relative, it shifts and changes depending on what we compare the commodity to.

The fact that it is so much easier to remember the past than to generate the possible causes us to make plenty of weird decisions.