LEONARD MLODINOW

Non-human primates spend hours a day grooming each other. And with humans, touching is also important. It's a way to form bonds and connect in modern society. But you can also speed up the use of conscious purposes once you're aware of that, and it can be manipulated.

We should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism.

Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain.

You have to have passion for a subject to write about it. You can't expect your readers to feel any excitement if it's nothing but a boring writing exercise for you.

In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws.

Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words and are communicated - and understood - without conscious thought.

Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.

On the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.

We have emotions for a reason; for instance, imagine pain. You have pain so that if you touch something that's hot, or if you slam your hand with a hammer, you will pull your hand away and not do that again.

I believe in a kind of God. I think all scientists, in a way, believe in a certain God, in a certain order of nature.

French culture is known for many great attributes, some of which probably have nothing to do with food, wine, and romance.

Politicians often misuse science for political ends and to pursue their own agenda.

One thing that feeds into the way you experience the social world is your mood - and one thing that affects your mood is the weather.

Expressive speech, with modulation in pitch and volume, and a minimum of noticeable pauses, boosts credibility and enhances the impression of intelligence.

Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

The pitch, timbre, volume, speed, and cadence of your voice, the speed with which you speak, and even the way you modulate pitch and loudness, are all hugely influential factors in how convincing you are and how people judge your state of mind and character.

One of the ways we interact with other human beings and form social bonds is through touch, and probably most of us are not aware of the extreme importance of touch.

We perceive, we remember our experiences, we make judgments, we act - and in all of these endeavors, we are influenced by factors that we aren't aware of.

We unwittingly judge products by their boxes, books by their covers, and even corporation's annual reports by their nice glossy finish.

Social rejection doesn't just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being.

People spend a lot of time talking and thinking about how members of the opposite sex look, but very little time paying attention to how they sound. To our unconscious minds, however, voice is very important.

Whatever I've worked on, I've always tried to make my writing personal. I think that's what makes my books somewhat different from what other scientists are doing. You have to tie concepts into everyday life, or they just won't be interesting for readers.

Listeners instinctively detect that when we lower the usual pitch of our voice, we are sad, and when we raise it, we are angry or fearful.

We all know that looks matter. What most of us don't understand is just how much looks matter and how difficult it is for us to ignore a person's appearance when making a social judgment.

I believe there is true expertise in some endeavors, and not in others. There is obviously no such thing as expertise in predicting the results of coin tosses, but there is expertise in predicting the behavior of lasers.