Cognitive Fixation Quotes

The enormous mental resilience, without which no Chess player can exist, was so much taken up by Chess that he could never free his mind of this game

Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.

People can get obsessed with romance, they can get obsessed with political paranoia, they can get obsessed with horror. It's isn't the fault of the subject matter that creates the obsession, I don't think.

Once you're a chess player, you spend a lot of time thinking about the game and you can't get it completely out of your head.

The thing that keeps the thoughts coming back is the power that you put in the thought that you can't think of it.

Thinking is compulsive: you can't stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don't even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable.

Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.

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.