Information consists of differences that make a difference.
A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
A new study has found that watching Fox News can make you more conservative and watching MSNBC can make you more liberal. And watching CNN can make you think that no plane has ever safely reached its destination.
Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.
But the scientific importance of a change in knowledge of fact consists precisely in j its having consequences for a system of theory.
It's hard to say how certain stories just punch us in the heart and the brain at the same time at the end. I suppose that's what we're all looking for. But each story has its own valence, its own way of saying goodbye to you.
I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries.
The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
Human thought can literally transform the physical world .. we are the masters of our own universe
I never look at the newspaper in the morning. That's the worst thing you can do with your brain.
I have a theory that all abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, is foremost an assault on the mind.
Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.
Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.
You can binge a TV series or watch a reality show, and they're not innocent. They take a lot of room in your brain, and you don't have any space left for your own thoughts. They give you a scripted reality. It's an ideological tool.
Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.
Books have always a secret influence on the understanding.
Sarah Palin has admitted she tried marijuana several years ago, but she did not like it. She said it distorted her perceptions, impaired her thinking, and she's hoping that the effects will eventually wear off.
What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think.
Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyze, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain. . . .
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that.
Pain wastes the Body, Pleasures the Understanding.
Replacing human vision is more than just a tool: we need to understand how that affects the brain.
Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.
Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason
