Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the...

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

Being different will always threaten the institution of understanding of a closed mind. However, evolution is built on difference, changing and the concept of thinking outside the box. Live to be your own unique brand,...

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, “had made both sides see themselves as they are.

The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion;...

Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. […] We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions […] We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men...

Bias rules our minds and causes us to overlook the obvious. From ‘Fillossofee: Messages From a Grandfather’, by Robert Gately

You maintain hope for humanity as an infinite skeptic of gossip and slander. In all mankind’s desires for entertainment and exaggeration and sensationalism, when it comes to gossip, the individual always sounds worse than he...

The government researchers, aware of the information in the professional journals, decided to reverse the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They decided to use selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of...

A…reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

If you could do one thing to improve yourself today, it would be this: Rid yourself of bias. If you can do this, you can learn to listen. If you learn to listen, then you...

ANYTHING being discussed in a group is particularly good only if that very thing is not particularly supporting ANYONE.

When your family dies, that’s a bummer, but that’s life. When my family dies, it’s a tragedy and the world is unbalanced and biased.

Holding one’s self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the...

I had people saying ‘it’s all in your head’. Do you honestly think I want to feel this way?

Before you call yourself a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or any other theology, learn to be human first.

Satire’s nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.

False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004

Sometimes you can’t figure out the truth because you’re asking people that are emotionally or socially invested in you to be brutally honest. Often family or friends will tell you what you want to hear,...

Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.

His biases played a large role here, but for Komatsu bias was an important element of truth.

Labels bias our perceptions, thinking, and behavior. A label or story can either separate us from, or connect us to, nature. For our health and happiness, we must critically evaluate our labels and stories by...

Principles are meant to serve people, not people serving to uphold the principle, while harming the people.

The consideration of the quantity often takes the precedence over that of the quality in many significant activity of the society as the ordinary minds are in the great majority and the extraordinary brains are...

Free your mind of the damaging clots of bias, being kind only to your own kind isn’t kindness at all

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

From Colin A. Ross, 1995: The writer is the brother of the man who co-founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. He is writing to WGBH about a program called ‘Divided Memories’, which you may have...

When you are being judged by someone that has no idea who you are always remember this: Dogs always bark at strangers and usually there is always some wacko neighbor that wants to try out...

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren’t biased as well–they...

The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don’t understand.

I existed on my own terms. I was different my entire life. Some called me divergent, wild, crazy, unpredictable and unconformed—an apostate to the rules of the majority. I called myself God’s creation and found...

When I look at a person, I see a person – not a rank, not a class, not a title.

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the ‘official truth’. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists...

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.

Beside him Mr. Harris folded his morning newspaper and held it out to Claude.”Seen this yet?””No.””Don’t read it,” Mr. Harris said, folding the paper once more and sliding it under his rear. “It will only...

I prefer to rely on my memory. I have lived with that memory a long time, I am used to it, and if I have rearranged or distorted anything, surely that was done for my...

Truth’s nakedness is not concerned with whom it strikes – painfully, or with pleasure; responding appropriately to its ingenuous temperament, however, rewards perceptions of unbiased transparency.

We are stronger than stigma, but until more celebrity role models openly discuss mental illness we will still be stereotyped as less than capable, by an upside down world that thinks reality television is actually...

Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. they are scared of human pain. They dont want to be objective, it’s a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.

We find comfort among those who agree with us – growth among those who don’t.

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

What lies between where you are and where you want to be sometimes requires traveling through the Twilight Zone.