Mind: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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StillnessMind

Gratitude exercises, such as writing down a few things you are thankful for each week, raise wellbeing slightly on average. A 2025 review of studies with nearly 25,000 people in 28 countries found a real but small effect that varied between countries and methods.

One of the first experiments on the practice was a 2003 study by the psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough. Students who kept a weekly list of things they were grateful for felt better about their lives than those who listed everyday hassles, and a rise in good mood was the most consistent result. The 2025 meta-analysis, a study that pools the results of earlier studies, was published in the journal PNAS by a team that included McCullough. It combined 145 papers covering 24,804 participants and put the average effect at about 0.19 on a standard scale on which 0.2 counts as small. Effects were larger when researchers measured positive feelings, when several kinds of gratitude exercise were combined, and in studies that assigned people to groups by chance. The authors could not explain why results varied between countries and called for more research.

Positive psychologyRead card

StillnessMind

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz. In Man's Search for Meaning (1946) he argued that no one can take away our freedom to choose our attitude, so the line suits him, yet it has never been found in his writings. The American psychologist Rollo May described this pause between stimulus and response in 1963. Stephen Covey spread the idea, linked to Frankl, in 1989; he later said he had read it in a library book whose author he had forgotten.

Commonly misattributed to Viktor Frankl; wording popularised by later writersRead card

WonderMind

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist who shared the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his work on how people make judgements. The line comes from the chapter on happiness in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He called the effect the focusing illusion: whatever you are thinking about, such as a pay rise or a move, seems to matter more to your happiness than it really does. In a 1998 study, students in the American Midwest expected Californians to be happier because of the weather, yet both groups were about equally satisfied with their lives.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)Read card

StillnessHealth

Non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) is a recent name for guided relaxation done lying down and awake, often for 10 to 30 minutes. Most versions borrow from yoga nidra (“yogic sleep”) and the body scan, in which a voice moves your attention slowly through the body.

The term was coined by the Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who promoted it on his podcast as a plain-language label for practices such as yoga nidra, “yogic sleep”. Yoga nidra in its modern form was spread in the 1970s by the Indian teacher Satyananda Saraswati; it draws on older yoga as well as Western relaxation methods of the early 20th century. A session asks you to lie still, notice your breath and follow instructions that move attention from one part of the body to the next. Research is still small. A 2002 Danish brain-imaging study found more dopamine, a chemical linked to motivation and reward, released in part of the brain during yoga nidra, and small trials report better sleep and less anxiety. NSDR is not a single clinical method, and no study shows it can replace sleep.

Wellbeing practiceRead card

DriveMind

The Zeigarnik effect, named after the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, is the idea that interrupted tasks are remembered better than finished ones. Her 1927 study made it famous, but later research has struggled to repeat the result.

The story goes that the psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed a waiter who remembered every unpaid order in detail but forgot each one the moment the bill was settled. His Lithuanian-born student Bluma Zeigarnik tested the idea: people did a series of small tasks, some of which she interrupted, and afterwards they recalled the interrupted ones better. She published the results in 1927. Later attempts to repeat the experiment gave mixed results, and a 2025 review of the research found no reliable memory advantage. What did hold up was a related finding by her colleague Maria Ovsiankina: people feel a strong urge to go back and finish what they started. A 2011 study by E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that simply making a specific plan for an unfinished goal stopped it intruding on people's thoughts.

PsychologyRead card

WonderMind

Flow, the state of being deeply absorbed in what you are doing, turned up more often at work than in free time in a classic 1989 study. Yet while they worked, people also wished more often that they were doing something else.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934–2021) was a Hungarian-American psychologist at the University of Chicago who named flow after interviewing artists, athletes and chess players who described being carried along by what they were doing. With Judith LeFevre he followed 78 working adults for a week using the experience sampling method: pagers beeped at random moments, and each time people noted what they were doing and how they felt. A moment counted as flow when both the challenge and the person's skill were above their own average. Just over half of the moments at work qualified, against under a fifth of the moments at leisure. People in flow felt better whether at work or not, yet they still said they would rather be doing something else when working. The authors suggested people judge work by the common belief that it is a burden rather than by how it actually feels.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Judith LeFevre (1989)Read card

WonderMind

Hedonic adaptation is the tendency for the emotional impact of many positive or negative changes to fade as they become familiar.

The psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell called it the “hedonic treadmill” in 1971: however hard we run towards happiness, we stay in the same place. In a famous 1978 study, Brickman and colleagues interviewed 22 lottery winners and 29 people recently paralysed in accidents. The winners were not much happier than ordinary people and took less pleasure in small daily things, while the accident victims were less happy, but not as unhappy as others expected. Later research, using large surveys that followed the same people for years, softened the picture. Adaptation is often incomplete: long-term disability, unemployment and the death of a spouse can lower wellbeing for years, and people differ widely in how quickly they recover. There is no single happiness “set point” that everyone returns to after every event.

PsychologyRead card

DriveMind

The method of loci (Latin for “places”), also called the memory palace, improves recall by placing items along an imagined, familiar route, so that remembering becomes a walk through space.

Roman writers traced the method to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. According to the story Cicero tells, Simonides left a banquet hall moments before its roof collapsed, and he could identify the crushed guests by remembering where each had sat. Roman orators then used imagined buildings to memorise long speeches. To use it, you pick a place you know well, such as your home, and mentally put a vivid image of each item at a spot along the way; to recall, you walk the same route in your mind. Many competitors in memory championships rely on it. In a 2017 study in the journal Neuron, beginners who practised it for 30 minutes a day over six weeks remembered far more words from 72-word lists, and the gain was still there four months later.

Memory techniqueRead card

WonderMind

We tend to overestimate how much other people notice our appearance and our small mistakes; psychologists call this the spotlight effect. In a study published in 2000, students made to wear an embarrassing T-shirt guessed that about half the people in a room would remember it; in fact only about one in five did.

The study was run at Cornell University by the psychologist Thomas Gilovich with Victoria Husted Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky. Students put on a T-shirt showing the singer Barry Manilow, a choice the researchers expected to embarrass them, and walked into a room where other students sat facing the door. In further experiments, people in group discussions also overestimated how much the others had noticed their good and bad remarks. The researchers' explanation is a kind of anchoring: we start from our own vivid sense of what we did or how we look, then fail to adjust enough for the fact that others are busy with their own concerns. A related bias, the illusion of transparency, makes us think our nervousness shows more than it does. The effect is an average tendency: some people do notice, just fewer than we fear.

PsychologyRead card

WonderMind

Loss aversion is the tendency to feel a loss more strongly than a gain of the same size. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described it in 1979, and it helps explain why many people turn down a coin toss that would win them 150 on heads but lose them 100 on tails.

Kahneman and Tversky, two Israeli psychologists, made loss aversion a central part of prospect theory, their account of how people really make decisions under risk, published in the journal Econometrica. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002; Tversky had died in 1996. A famous example is the endowment effect: in experiments published in 1990, students given a coffee mug asked more than twice as much to sell it as other students were willing to pay for it. The popular rule that losses weigh about twice as much as gains has held up on average: a 2024 review of 607 estimates from 150 studies found an average ratio close to two. Individual estimates still vary widely with the person, the task and how choices are framed, and some researchers argue the effect is weaker in everyday decisions than once believed.

PsychologyRead card

WonderMind

The IKEA effect is our tendency to value things more when we have made them ourselves. In a 2011 study, people who assembled a simple IKEA storage box were willing to pay about 63% more for it than people who were shown the same box already built.

The effect was named by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely, who asked volunteers to build IKEA boxes, fold origami and put together Lego sets. People who folded their own origami valued their clumsy frogs and cranes about as highly as other people valued figures made by experts, and expected everyone else to agree. The boost appeared only when the job was finished: people who built something and then took it apart, or never completed it, did not show it. The finding fits older research on effort justification, the tendency to value whatever has cost us effort. The researchers pointed to Build-A-Bear Workshop, where customers pay to stuff their own teddy bears, as a business built on the effect. The same pride can make it harder to see the flaws in our own work.

PsychologyRead card

DriveMind

People are more likely to start on a goal just after a date that marks a new beginning, such as a Monday, the first of the month, a birthday or New Year's Day. Psychologists call this the fresh start effect.

The effect was named in a 2014 paper by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis of the Wharton School in Philadelphia. Looking at real-world records, they found that Google searches for the word 'diet', gym visits and sign-ups on a website where people make formal commitments to their goals all rose after such dates: the start of a week, month, year or term, a birthday or a holiday. Their explanation is that these dates divide time into chapters. Past slips feel as if they belong to an old self, and people step back to look at their lives as a whole. In later experiments by the same team, simply describing a day as the start of a new period, rather than as an ordinary date, made people keener to begin.

PsychologyRead card

WonderMind

The bystander effect is the finding that a person is less likely to help in an emergency when other people are present, partly because each assumes someone else will act. Yet in real street conflicts filmed by CCTV, at least one bystander stepped in nine times out of ten.

Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané began testing the idea in 1968, after a New York newspaper wrongly reported that dozens of neighbours had watched the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese and done nothing. In one experiment, students talking over an intercom heard another student apparently having a seizure. Of those who believed they were his only listener, 85% went for help before the fit ended; of those who believed four others could hear, only 31% did. Darley and Latané called this diffusion of responsibility: the more people present, the less each feels it is up to them. A 2011 review of studies with more than 7,700 participants found the effect is weaker in clearly dangerous situations. And a 2019 study of 219 real conflicts in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and South Africa found that more bystanders made it more likely that someone helped.

Ikigai DailyRead card

DriveMind

The Pygmalion effect is the finding that high expectations from others can lift a person's performance. In a 1960s study, teachers were told that certain pupils, in fact picked at random, were about to blossom; months later the youngest of those pupils had gained more on IQ tests than their classmates.

The study was run by the psychologist Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, a primary school principal in South San Francisco, and published in 1968 as Pygmalion in the Classroom. The name comes from the Greek myth of a sculptor whose statue came to life, and from George Bernard Shaw's play in which a professor transforms a flower seller's speech. The findings were challenged: the psychologist Robert Thorndike found serious flaws in the IQ test, and later studies often failed to repeat the result. A 2005 review of 35 years of research by Lee Jussim and Kent Harber concluded that expectation effects in classrooms are real but usually small, can fade over time and may be stronger for pupils from stigmatised groups. Teachers seem to pass expectations on through warmth, feedback and the chances they give a pupil. The opposite, where low expectations hold people back, is called the Golem effect.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderMind

The frequency illusion is the feeling that something you have just noticed, such as a new word, a car model or a name, has suddenly started turning up everywhere. Usually it was always there; what has changed is your attention.

The effect got its popular name in 1994, when a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota wrote to the paper that, after first hearing of the Baader-Meinhof group, a West German militant organisation, he kept coming across the name. Other readers sent in similar stories, and 'Baader-Meinhof phenomenon' stuck as a nickname. In 2005 the Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky named it the frequency illusion and explained it with two ordinary mental habits. Selective attention means the brain filters out most of what we see and hear but lets through whatever has recently become important to us. Confirmation bias means we then treat each new sighting as proof and forget the days we saw nothing. Zwicky also described a related recency illusion: assuming that a word or usage you have only just noticed must be new, when it is often much older.

Ikigai DailyRead card

DriveMind

Failure is impossible.

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) said this on 15 February 1906, at the celebration of her 86th birthday in Washington, less than a month before she died. She had campaigned for more than fifty years for women's right to vote; in 1872 she was arrested for voting and fined $100, which she never paid. Naming the women beside her, she said that with such women devoting their lives to the cause, failure was impossible. The phrase became a watchword of the suffrage movement. American women won the vote in 1920.

Susan B. AnthonyRead card

DriveMind

The best protection any woman can have is courage.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was the main organiser of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the first women's rights convention. Her demand there for women's right to vote was the only resolution not passed unanimously. This line is widely quoted as hers, but it is not in her memoir, Eighty Years and More, or her speech 'Solitude of Self', and its source is uncertain. It fits that 1892 speech, which argued that every woman must finally face life alone and so needs education, self-reliance and training in self-protection.

Elizabeth Cady StantonRead card

StillnessMind

A watched pot never boils.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1785 that 'a watched pot is slow to boil' and credited it to his Poor Richard, though it appears in none of the almanacs. The familiar wording is in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton (1848). The water boils just as fast either way; what changes is how long the wait feels. Psychologists Delwin Cahoon and Ed Edmonds tested it in 1980: people asked to watch a pot and say when it boiled judged a four-minute interval as longer than people given no such task.

English ProverbRead card

StillnessMind

The axe forgets; the tree remembers.

This proverb comes from the Shona people of Zimbabwe. The linguist G. Fortune of the University of Cape Town recorded it in his 1955 grammar of the Shona language, where the one that does not forget is the tree stump. The poet Maya Angelou used the short form 'The ax forgets. The tree remembers.' in a 1997 essay collection, which helped spread it in English. It describes the two sides of harm: the one who strikes can forget quickly, while the one who was hurt carries the mark for years.

African ProverbRead card

WonderMind

You cannot wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

This saying is often labelled Native American or Navajo, but its recorded history points elsewhere. A close version appeared in a Calcutta newspaper in 1888, and Mahatma Gandhi used it in 1928; collectors later found similar proverbs among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Oromo of Ethiopia and in Somalia. The Navajo label appears only in the 1990s. Its logic travels well: a sleeper wakes when called, but someone who is pretending has chosen not to hear, and more noise will not change that.

Native American, widely attributed ProverbRead card

StillnessMind

Learning never exhausts the mind.

No notebook or letter of Leonardo's contains this sentence, and it has not been traced to a dated early source, so it is best read as a popular attribution. It does echo a note he really wrote, in the Codex Atlanticus: iron rusts when it is not used, still water goes stale or freezes in the cold, and in the same way inaction wears down the strength of the mind. Leonardo (1452–1519) left more than 7,000 pages of notes on anatomy, water, optics, flight and much else.

Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci; no source found in his notebooks or in any dated printed recordRead card

DriveMind

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

There is no trace of this line in Einstein's writings, letters or recorded talks; it was first linked to him in print in the late 1990s. It belongs to a family of sayings more than 150 years old: the Scottish author Samuel Smiles put a version in his 1859 book Self-Help. Einstein himself did change his mind. In 1917 he added a ‘cosmological constant’ to his equations to keep the universe static; after astronomers found it was expanding, he dropped it, and the physicist George Gamow later recalled him calling it his biggest blunder.

Attributed to Einstein; earliest known link 1995Read card

WonderMind

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

In Madame Curie (1937), the biography by her younger daughter Eve, this is a line Marie Curie often gave reporters who wanted personal stories rather than science. A similar thought appears earlier, in her own 1923 book about her husband Pierre Curie, where she credits him with the belief that in science we should be interested in things, not persons. Pierre and Marie discovered polonium and radium together in 1898. After Pierre was killed in a street accident in 1906, Marie carried on alone and won a second Nobel Prize in 1911.

Marie Curie, as quoted in Eve Curie, Madame Curie (1937); a similar idea is credited to Pierre in Marie Curie's Pierre Curie (1923)Read card

StillnessMind

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

Widely attributed to Carl Jung, but no one has found it in his writings; it reads as a modern summary of a Jungian idea. Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist who worked with Sigmund Freud before breaking with him in 1913 and founding his own school, analytical psychology. He argued that what stays unconscious in us tends to repeat itself in our lives, while what we bring into awareness becomes something we can choose. He called the lifelong work of becoming a whole person 'individuation'.

Carl Jung (attributed)Read card