Steven Pinker Quotes

By combining elements such as hypnosis, magic, neurolinguistic programming and psychology, I can make it appear that I can hack into people's brains.

If you're in somebody's head for 12 hours a day for four weeks, it's like your brain actually wires itself to start thinking that way.

Our thoughts are mainly controlled by our subconscious, which is largely formed before the age of 6, and you cannot change the subconscious mind by just thinking about it.

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

Ideas have far-reaching consequences, and one must be ever so careful about what one allows to lodge in one's brain.

When you repeat a new pattern often, you literally change the neural pathways in your brain. This shift helps true change settle in.

The mind is a product of experience. It is the result of past thinking and is modified by present thinking.

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

If you choose, you can influence every aspect of your brain, and therefore every aspect of your life.

I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

What the mind dwells upon, the body acts upon.

The thing I want to know is, if you tell your brain not to do stuff... and it keeps doing it anyway, does that mean your mind has a mind of its own? And if it does, then who's in charge here, anyway?

At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.

Be selective about your external influences. Your multi-dimensional brain is influenced by everything you see, hear, read, smell, touch, feel or say.

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials -- they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think -- rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

I need to get a greater vocabulary than what I have and when I get mad and my brain searches for a word. I have to find different words and to do that you need to have more of an education.

Human thought can literally transform the physical world .. we are the masters of our own universe

Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.

When we walk, the two halves of our brains converse.

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

My brain gets stronger every day because I exercise it. The stronger it gets, the more money I can make.

Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.

I always wonder: the images that hit your brain when you're young are so significant, because there's not that much information in your brain. As you get older, things just bounce off. I can remember these minute details of stupid TV shows from the '70s, and I can't remember a book I read yesterday.