Subconscious Influences Quotes

Personally, I’ve gotten so that I now use a kind of two-track analysis. First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered? And second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain at a subconscious level is automatically conclusions in various ways — which, by and large, are useful — but which often malfunction? One approach is rationality… And the other is to evaluate the psychological factors that cause subconscious conclusions — many of which are wrong.

History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.

I believe everything is autobiographical. If it's not strictly about you, it's your peers, your obsessions, things that make you angry, or things that you've been watching or obsessing about. Preoccupying you for reasons you don't necessarily know, but it's about you. It says a lot about you. It's like when someone tells you their dream and you sit there going, "Do you realize how much you're revealing about yourself right now?" It's kind of embarrassing.

So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds.

People read so much into what I do. It's fascinating to me because some of it's probably there, but I haven't thought of it.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.

What you don't deal with rules your life.

Now, in practice, in daily social interactions, etc., there may be all kinds of biases and prejudices that are unspoken, that people aren't aware of, that affect who's hired, and who gets loans, and how kids are treated in school. But it's a powerful thing if you have on your side an idea that the overwhelming majority of people believe in because that's how you can build a consensus that's lasting.

Through its influence upon the unconscious, music can have a specific healing effect. It can help in eliminating repressions and resistances, and it can bring into the field of waking consciousness many drives, emotions and complexes which were creating difficulties in the unconscious.

A nudge is some feature of the environment that changes the behaviour of humans but would not change the behaviour of rational economic agents, what we call Econs.

We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.

When researchers try to break down what is happening at Mosaic, far too often they see the skin and miss the heart.

... there are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.

Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

The mingled incentives which lead to action are often too subtle and lie too deep for us to analyze.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

We are not so easily guided by our most prominent weaknesses as by those of which we are least aware.

The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.