Wisdom in fragments

We have the tendency to follow those who are comparable to us. It reduces uncertainty and provides us with an extremely effective shortcut into deciding how to best behave in a world that has become overloaded with information and stimulus. We need shortcuts!

Influence & Persuasion Expert; Author of "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

If you go into a new situation where you don't know anybody and you want to be more influential, don't look around the room and say hmmm… who can most help me here?… instead, look around and say hmmm…. Who can I most help here? You will put that person in a position where they will be standing on the balls of their feet to help you!

Influence & Persuasion Expert; Author of "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I'm drawn here quite often to thinking about impressionist art like Monet or Pissarro which have a beautiful incompleteness- they're just scratches and blobs on canvas but done so well that the brain is drawn into completing the image. That's partly why paintings like that have such aesthetic appeal- because they're engaging the mechanisms of the brain in completing the picture.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

Emotions are perception, but perception of the body itself. You see something scary like a bear, that triggers all kinds of physiological changes in your body. Your heart rate increases, your breath quickens, and the perception of those changes is the emotion. Emotion is another kind of controlled hallucination but geared to the interior of the body rather than the outside world.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

We all inhabit distinctive inner universes. We all see and experience the world in a slightly different way. There are some extremely viral examples such as the dress which people perceived as being different colours – these things go viral and get popular because they reveal something that is essentially true but often hidden- that people can be exposed to the same image or be in the same place and be having very different experiences.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. The philosopher, Thomas Nagel, put it like this, 'for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism…' – there is something it is like to be me, to be you, to be a dolphin – but there's probably nothing like what it is to be a chair, table, or iPhone.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The process of problem definition is a discipline that we rarely teach or learn. It is one of the most important things that we can invest our time in.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

Today, we have the tools to enable institutions to operate simultaneously at micro and macro scales. We have the tools today to allow us to get smarter faster. But we do have to learn how to do it.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

We don't need bigger or smaller government; we need better government. A leaner, more agile, more innovative government can solve problems faster, without necessitating more money being spent or the overall size of government increasing. This isn't a left or right issue; I think we can all agree on the fact that we want efficient government.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

When you're blending digital and physical, you'd better know how things are made. When I talk to my students it's shocking how few of them have ever been to a factory, and how few of them know what a CNC machine is or how goods get from A to B efficiently.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

The enemy has to be outside the building, not inside. If the enemy is outside the building, whether you're working on innovation or your quarterly sales-target, you're on the same team… you're playing for the name on the front of the jersey, not the back.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades