Mental Limits Quotes

“We pay attention to what we are told to attend to, or what we're looking for, or what we already know...what we see is amazingly limited.”
― Daniel Simons

“Humans do not have enough mental capacity to do all the things that we think we can do. As attentional load increases, attentional capacity gradually diminishes.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“people will focus on procedures and not notice anything that isn't just part of the procedures”
― Daniel Simons

“When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert...Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“She didn't realize she was in a prison until she collided with the bars.”
― Joyce Rachelle