To Have A Style Is To Be

How Do We Regulate Our Emotions? The Answer Is Surprisingly Simple: By Thinking About Them. The Prefrontal Cortex Allows Each Of Us To Contemplate His Or Her Own Mind, A Talent Psychologists Call Metacognition. We Know When We Are Angry; Every Emotional State Comes With Self-awareness Attached, So That An Individual Can Try To Figure Out Why He's Feeling What He's Feeling. If The Particular Feeling Makes No Sense—if The Amygdala Is Simply Responding To A Loss Frame, For Example—then It Can Be Discounted. The Prefrontal Cortex Can Deliberately Choose To Ignore The Emotional Brain.

[it's] Troubling Because It Reminds Us How Difficult It Is To Prove Anything. We Like To Pretend That Our Experiments Define The Truth For Us. But That's Often Not The Case. Just Because An Idea Is True Doesn't Mean It Can Be Proved. And Just Because An Idea Can Be Proved Doesn't Mean It's True. When The Experiments Are Done, We Still Have To Choose What To Believe.

People Assume That They Perceive Reality As It Is, That Our Senses Accurately Record The Outside World. Yet The Science Suggests That, In Important Ways, People Experience Reality Not As It Is, But As They Expect It To Be.

I Always Wanted To Be A Scientist, I Always Thought I'd Be A Scientist, That Was The Narrative I Was Carrying Around. I Worked In A Neuroscience Lab As An Undergraduate And Then After, Almost Five Years In Total, But I Realized I Just Wasn't Good At Science. I Didn't Have The Discipline For It.

In Fact, The Only Way To Remain Creative Over Time--to Not Be Undone By Our Expertise--is To Experiment With Ignorance, To Stare At Things We Don't Fully Understand.