Unconscious Decisions Quotes

The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.

We act in ways that are mysterious to ourselves.

It is better for you to take responsibility for your life as it is, instead of blaming others, or circumstances, for your predicament. As your eyes open, you'll see that your state of health, happiness, and every circumstance of your life has been, in large part, arranged by you - consciously or unconsciously.

Dreams have as much influence as actions.

The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions.

I tend to make my most important decisions by following my instincts rather than any straightforward logic.

It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish.

The discovery of the habit loop is important because it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks.

There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.

It's obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don't want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can't explain. It's like painting: You don't know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that's how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don't want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can't help it; that's just the way it is.

Most of us make unconscious choices in the words that we use; we sleep-walk through the maze of possibilities available to us.

Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all.

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

I'm always interested in a character who does something and doesn't understand why they've done it.

I think there are influences that you open the door to, and influences that come under the door.

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.

Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are.

Figuring out why people who choose not to do something don't in fact do it is like attempting to interview the elves who live inside your refrigerator but come out only when the light is off.

Every aspect of our lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us.

'Subliminal' is about how we misinterpret our behavior because we're unaware of what our unconscious minds are doing.

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

Sometimes, people aren't as consciously aware of their decisions as they should be.