John M. Coates > Quotes

“Yet of this massive flow of information no more than about 40 bits per second actually reaches consciousness. We are, in other words, conscious of only a trivial slice of all the information coming into the brain for processing.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“Thinking, one could say, is something we do only when we are no good at an activity.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust

“good judgment may require the ability to listen carefully to feedback from the body.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“Remember this rule,” advises Kahneman: “Intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“As George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon, points out, “There is little evidence beyond fallible introspection supporting the standard assumption of complete volitional control of behavior.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“Consciousness, these experiments suggested, is merely a bystander observing a decision already taken, almost like watching ourselves on video.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“We process more information in the lower half of our visual field, because there is normally more to see on the ground than in the sky. We group objects into units of three or four in order to perceive numbers rather than count them, a process known as subitising, that comes in handy when assessing the number of opponents in battle.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“the true miracle of human evolution was the development of advanced control systems for synchronizing body and brain.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“hubris syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by recklessness, an inattention to detail, overwhelming self-confidence and contempt for others; all of which, he observes, “can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.” The syndrome, he continues, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“The brain stem, often called the reptile brain, controls automatic processes such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. The cerebellum stores physical skills and fast behavioral reactions; it also contributes to dexterity, balance and coordination. The hypothalamus controls hormones and coordinates electrical and chemical elements of homeostasis. The amygdala processes information for emotional meaning. The neocortex, the most recently evolved layer of the brain, processes discursive thought, planning and voluntary movement. The insula (located on the far side and near the top of the illuminated brain regions) gathers information from the body and assembles it into a sense of our embodied existence.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“thought itself is best understood as planning; even higher forms of thought, such as philosophy, the epitome of disembodied speculation, proceed, they argue, by hijacking algorithms originally developed to help us plan movements.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

“Damasio and Bechara developed their ‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, each event we store in memory comes bookmarked with the bodily sensations – Damasio and Bechara call these ‘somatic markers’ – we felt at the time of living through it for the first time; and these help us decide what to do when we find ourselves in a similar situation.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust

“feeling was an integral component of the machinery of reason.”
― John M. Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind