L. Ron Hubbard Quotes

What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.

As soon as you hear a proposition, the creative brain in humans assumes for the moment that it's true, and starts trying to find evidence. It's what computer scientists in the old days used to call 'Fifo:' first in, first out. The first piece of information that gets in has a privileged position, even if it's misinformation.

Moreover, joint occurrences tend to be better recalled than instances when the effect does not occur. The proneness to remember confirming instances, but to overlook disconfirming ones, further serves to convert, in thought, coincidences into causalities.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

The idea that when you correct a fact, you erase that fact from people's memories is the reverse of the truth. When you correct a fact, what you do is you further lodge that fact into people's minds, and they remember the error.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.

People like things that make sense to them; your perspective is your reality.

The left brain is responsible for making order out of chaos, for making sense of things in the world that don't always add up. To do this, it often makes up stories, fantastic confabulations in some cases, just to be able to explain what we're experiencing.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

The easiest thing to do is put someone in a file of somebody you already know. 'Hey, you remind me of Sam Kinison' or 'You remind me of Richard Pryor.' That's fine, because I know that's the process. Eventually, my own file will be created.

I just have pretty good recall of information.

The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience.

When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

All learning is remembering. A good teacher causes students to remember what they already know.

As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a "giant pattern detector." If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge.

The experience of making a movie, you start to see it everywhere. It's just this amazing mechanism that your brain does because it just so badly wants to be helpful and keep all the information that you need as accessible as possible.

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.

The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche.

The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for.