Shankar Vedantam > Quotes

“Good people are not those who lack flaws, the brave are not those who feel no fear, and the generous are not those who never feel selfish. Extraordinary people are not extraordinary because they are invulnerable to unconscious biases. They are extraordinary because they choose to do something about it.”
― Shankar Vedantam

“Our minds are vulnerable to myths, falsehoods and fictions not merely because we are dumb or stupid, but because we are frail, flawed and easily afraid. Advocating fearless rationality—an end to myth-making and myth-believing—is not just about being smart. It is a matter of privilege. If you don’t lack for food and water, for physical security or a police department that comes when you call, you might not feel the need to turn to myths, rationalizations and rituals. You may have no need for fellow members of your tribe to come to your assistance when you are sick, because there are doctors and hospitals who will do a better job. If you think of yourself as a citizen of the world because borders are illusions and people everywhere are the same, you probably haven’t lived through the kind of persecution that makes you desperate for the protection of your fellow tribesmen. It’s fine to hold secular, cosmopolitan views. But when rationalists look down on people who crave the hollow panaceas of tribe and nation, it’s like Marie Antoinette asking why peasants who lack bread don’t satisfy themselves with cake. They fail to grasp what life is like for most people on the planet.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Author compares the impact of biases to his experience as an average swimmer who overcame a considerable fear of water. While the swimming was easy in one particular experience, he was internally congratulating himself on his acquired skill. But when he realized he was swimming with a current he would now have to fight against, he realized just how definite his limits were.”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

“Unconscious bias influences our lives in exactly the same manner as that undercurrent that took me out so far that day. When undercurrents aid us … we are invariably unconscious of them. We never credit the undercurrent for carrying us so swiftly; we credit ourselves, our talents, our skills. I was completely sure that it was my swimming ability that was carrying me out so swiftly that day. It did not matter that I knew in my heart that I was a very average swimmer, it did not matter that I knew that I should have worn a life jacket and flippers. On the way out, the idea of humility never occurred to me. It was only at the moment I turned back, when I had to go against the current, that I even realized the current existed.”
― Shankar Vedantam

“There is no use complaining about the hidden brain, or wishing it away. The telescope effect in our moral judgment is part of our nature. There is nothing we can do about it. But there is something we can do about our actions. We can choose to allow our actions to be guided by reason rather than instinct, choose to set up national and international institutions that respond instantly to humanitarian crises, rather than wait for our heartstrings to be pulled by stories of individual tragedy. If we rely on our moral telescopes, there will be people in a hundred years who ask how the world could have sat on its hands through so many genocides in the twenty-first century. Making”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and SaveOur Lives

“A wide array of research shows that people who are delusionally optimistic tend to outlive people with more realistic attitudes.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“People with depression and some other disorders often see reality more clearly.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“It’s a grave mistake to think that evolution is remotely interested in helping us perceive reality accurately. Natural selection has one simple standard: Evolutionary “fitness” is about whatever helps us survive and pass on our genes.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth,” he said, referencing the tribes that once flourished on the geographical boundaries of modern France. We think we are citizens of a nation because we have “forgotten many things.” Since Renan, others have tried and failed to establish a good definition of a nation. There really aren’t any objective criteria that can explain the diverse origins, functions and commonalities of different nations. Perhaps the most accurate definition of a nation was put forward by the political scientist Benedict Anderson. His conclusion was that we believe ourselves to be Greek or Syrian or Nigerian simply because we believe ourselves to be Greek or Syrian or Nigerian. A nation, he wrote, is a social construction—an “imagined community.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“The philosopher Alain de Botton has written that we will all “marry the wrong person.” It’s a claim that often provokes a strong reaction. But de Botton is not making a case for divorce. Quite the opposite. He argues that, to make marriage work, we need to deal with the inevitable imperfections of our partners. De Botton wants us to reject the “founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last two hundred and fifty years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.” In reality, “every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us—and we will (without any malice) do the same to them.” How to solve this unsolvable problem? An array of psychological research studies show that in most healthy relationships, people see their partners through rose-tinted glasses: We see them as better people than objective analysis would justify.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“some students look at the problems that they're facing and they draw global conclusions from them. They say this is not just a professor giving me a bad grade or someone not sitting next to me in the cafeteria. This reflects that fact that I am not ready for college, or I shouldn't be in this college at all.”
― Shankar Vedantam

“There might well be deep evolutionary reasons for these fears; it made sense, millennia ago, to fear situations where we had no control and situations that involved malevolent attackers. In our modern world, however, the things we really ought to fear are almost entirely of our own doing. Failing to climb the stairs and get enough exercise kills far more people than any number of murderers climbing those stairs. You are at far greater risk of taking your own life than being killed by a terrorist. If you were to go strictly by the numbers, that cigarette in your hand ought to have you screaming louder than a chance encounter with Hannibal Lecter.”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and SaveOur Lives

“Many people hold false beliefs not because they are in love with falsehoods, or because they are stupid—as conventional wisdom might suggest—but because those beliefs help them hold their lives together in some way.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“one reason people cling to false beliefs is because self-deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology or villainy.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“A great deal of the suffering caused by disease is caused by our own reactions to illness: Our anxiety and worry about the ailments we have, and what it means to be sick.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“generations: Rituals offer a way for human beings to deal with a dangerous and unpredictable world. They generate community, conformity and courage. Asking whether they “work” in a literal sense misses the point. They work at a psychological level, and sometimes—as in the case of the Congolese village that fought off the Hutu militants—psychological reality turns into actual reality.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“I once asked a linguist what the difference was between a dialect and a language. “Languages,” he quipped, “are dialects that have armies.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“If self-deception is functional, then it will endure, regardless of all the best sellers that criticize it. Life, like evolution and natural selection, ultimately doesn’t care about what’s true. It cares about what works.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“What if false beliefs help people live longer and connect better with their families? What if myths help communities thrive? What if fictions allow nations to come together? What if self-deceptions prompt people to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of others, and thereby help their communities, tribes and nations?”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Soldiers inspired by religion were more likely to defeat their enemies than those who were not.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Delusional overconfidence is very bad for many men as individuals, but the researchers found that as a group, it helps men succeed.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“I realized that one reason people cling to false beliefs is because self-deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology or villainy.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Those of us who have a memory are able to live in that fragile space between the past and the future. Those of us who have none are already dead.”
― Shankar Vedantam

“For all the ways this book has shown how the rational mind is unequal to the machinations of the hidden brain, this is also a book that argues that reason is our only bulwark against bias.”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and SaveOur Lives

“If drama and theater and expectations can change the outcome of patients suffering from arthritis, can’t it do the same for diners in a restaurant?”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wrote, “One can try to recreate the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness . . . becomes a madman.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“People reminded of death also awarded more generous rewards to people who performed prosocial, or culturally approved behaviors. In both cases, it is as though people reminded of their own deaths hew to actions that defend their culture’s norms—they are more willing to reward culturally sanctioned behavior and to punish culturally deviant behavior.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“In a 1975 paper titled “Everybody Has to Lie,” the sociologist Harvey Sacks, founder of a field called “conversation analysis,” detailed the myriad deceptions found in ordinary, day-to-day settings, beginning with basic greetings, usually some version of “How are you?” in which the person who asks doesn’t actually care, and the person who answers isn’t expected to be truthful.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies,”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain