Quotes About Control

It is very likely that intrinsic variability in the functioning of the brain also affects the quality of our judgments in ways that we cannot possibly hope to control.

A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention.

I am generally not optimistic about the potential for personal control of biases, but this is an exception.

Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.

A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.

But System 2 is not merely an apologist for System 1; it also prevents many foolish thoughts and inappropriate impulses from overt expression.

However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; measures of efficiency in the control of attention predict performance of air traffic controllers and of Israeli Air Force pilots beyond the effects of intelligence.

psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Furthermore, System 2 has no control over the effect and no knowledge of it. The participants who have been exposed to random or absurd anchors (such as Gandhi's death at age 144) confidently deny that this obviously useless information could have influenced their estimate, and they are wrong.

defining risk is thus an exercise in power.

It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1.

Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.

One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions "suggested" by System 1, allowing some to be expressed directly in behavior and suppressing or modifying others.

The increase in man's power over his environment has not been accompanied by a concomitant improvement of his ability to make rational use of that power

To be read in context!!!) People who are "cognitively busy" are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but if course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control.

Whenever things were frightening, it was a good idea to measure them.

Sen mä vaan sanon, että jollei meikä olis näin rauhallinen tyyppi, niin siis joskus tosissaan pumppu haulikko, helvetti irti, niska laukaus ja murha poltto, ja täyttä häkää sittekki.

That's the thing about human life--there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

But the main reason we keep ducking the responsibility of self-creation is that it is super scary. If I am the master of my fate and my fate does not turn out so well, I have no one to blame but myself.

The damaged frontal regions normally play an important role in assessing or monitoring signals provided by other neural systems.

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.40 And occasionally dead.