The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.