All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

We were required to predict a soldier's performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is." We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual's future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like "He will be a star."

It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.