Deviate Quotes

“The only true voyage of discovery (is) to behold the universe through the eyes of another - Marcel Proust”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Information is agnostic. Meaning isn't. The meaning you make with this knowledge is up to you.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“If you imagine complex, challenging possibilities, your brain will adapt to them. Much like a tiger trapped in a zoo exhibits repetitive displacement behavior, if you cage your imagination within the bars of the dull and neurotic, which often portray one’s fears more than they do an empirical “truth,” then your brain will adapt to these imagined meanings, too. Like the sad tiger pacing back and forth within its puny cage, your brain too will ruminate cyclically upon destructive meanings, and in doing so make them more significant than they might need to be. This present perceptual meaning becomes part of your future history of meanings, together with the meaning (and re-meanings) of past events, thus shaping your future perception. If you don’t want to let received contexts limit possibility, then you need to walk in the darkest forest of all—the one in your own skull—and face down the fear of ideas that challenge.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: 'A more accessible THINKING FAST AND SLOW' Wired

“Our perceptions are an ongoing, ever-growing. ever-changing story, and our brain allows us to be not just passive listeners to that story, but also the storytellers as well”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Development never truly ends, as our brains evolved to evolve...we are adapted to adapt, to continually redefine normality, transforming ones space of possibility with new assumptions according to the continual process of trial and error”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Are we products of nature or nurture? It's the wrong question. It's not one or the other. Nor is it a combination of both. It's their constant interaction.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Big Data:

by itself doesn't yield insights...information doesn't serve us...without knowing why....unless something transformative is brought to these data sets (to create) understanding

Gathering data is easy, understanding why is hard.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“The world out there is really just our three-dimensional screen”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“A good leader thinks in shades of grey but speaks in black and white”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Understanding reduces the complexity of data by collapsing the dimensionality of information to a lower set of known variables. "
"There you have it: a generalizable principle. What was once a massive, high-dimensional dataset has now collapsed to a single dimension, a simple principle that comes from using the data but is not the data itself. Understanding transcends context, since the different contexts collapse according to their previously unknown similarity, which the principle contains. That is what understanding does. And you actually feel it in your brain when it happens. Your “cognitive load” decreases, your level of stress and anxiety decrease, and your emotional state improves.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“if you attack a problem with the wrong assumption, there is nowhere to go but deeper into that assumption”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“What makes you you and them them is how one deviates from the norm”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“This requires giving children the freedom to go, and the discipline and wisdom to know when to say stop, not because their transgression triggers one of your own fears, but because they are doing something that would actually harm them”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Research has found that successful leaders share three behavioral traits: they lead by example, admit their mistakes, and see positive qualities in others”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“In my view, as soon as you’ve told something to someone, you’ve taken the potential for a deeper meaning away from them. True knowledge is when information becomes embodied understanding: We have to act in the world to understand it.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Everything you see - everything - exists in only one place: in here. Inside your head.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Stopping gives you the chance of knowing less, of halting the perception-narrowing force of the cognitive biases that we are always trying to confirm, of taking the jerk out of knee-jerk and sitting with the meaninglessness of the stimuli, even if it doesn't feel meaningless.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“In other words, two people in a relationship never have the same past, never have the same brain, and thus never have the same space of possibility filled with the same ideas in the same positions of availability”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“It is clear, then, that the desire for certainty shapes our spaces of possibility, our perceptions, and our lives both personally and professionally. Usually, this need saves us. But it also sabotages us. This produces an ongoing tension between what we might think of as our conscious selves and our automatic selves. To overcome our inborn reflex that pushes us to seek certainty (sometimes at any cost), we must lead with our conscious selves and tell ourselves a new story, one that with insistent practice will change our future past and even our physiological responses. We must create internal and external ecologies that… celebrate doubt!
This means the biggest obstacle to deviation and seeing differently isn’t actually our environment as such, or our” intelligence, or even—ironically—the challenge of reaching the mythical “aha” moment. Rather, it is the nature of human perception itself, and in particular the perceived need for knowing. Yet the deep paradox is that the mechanisms of perception are also the process by which we can unlock powerful new perceptions and ways to deviate. Which means that mechanism of generating a perception is the blocker… and the process of creating perception is the enabler of creativity”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“creativity as we traditionally think of it is not creative at all. Creativity is only creative from the outside.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“What would you do, for instance, if you were in a romantic relationship with someone who treated you as if you had the average assumptions of humankind? What’s more, imagine that this partner gave you the average amount of affection, spent the average amount of time with you, had average sex with you the average number of times per week in the average kind of way, shared the average amount of feelings, and hit the milestones of getting married and having kids at the average age (but hopefully not the average number of children, lest you be left with a fraction). Surprisingly, because humans are all variations on a theme, it’s not a bad strategy. Without bruising our egos too much, it’s likely that they’d do OK with this strategy… initially, that is, since as humans we all exhibit basic shared assumptions. Most relationships start this way… indeed most engagements with the unknown do, quite practically, since this is all one has to go on in the beginning.
However, is it a good strategy longer term? Definitely not. Engaging with people in the world as if they were an unchanging, measurable “average” can have disastrous effects.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“the”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: 'A more accessible THINKING FAST AND SLOW' Wired

“The brain—like life—does not search to live, but to not die. Which makes success an accident of what failure leaves behind when one is thoughtfully deluded enough to walk tilted (long) enough.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“I found this remarkable on several levels, but most profoundly in that it hinted at the way meaning is a plastic entity, much like the physical network of the brain, which we shape and reshape through perceptual experiences.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“Why might you need to deviate from the way you currently perceive?”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“spaces strongly affect our perceptions while we are occupying them. For instance, dimmer light increases creativity, whereas brighter light improves analytical thinking.84 Ceiling height improves abstract and relational thinking, and lower ceilings do the opposite.85 A view of generative landscapes improves generativity, whereas mild exertion temporarily improves memory and attention.86”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: 'A more accessible THINKING FAST AND SLOW' Wired

“information is agnostic. Meaning isn’t. The meaning you make with this knowledge is up to you.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“In essence, a society is nothing other than the changing density of the molecular elements that make us all up.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“For chess grand masters, the process of thinking during a match can "cost" up to 7000 calories a day”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

“In essence, a society is nothing other than the changing density of the molecular elements that make us all up. Each is just an attractor state within a larger system, like waves rising on the sea before crashing on the shore, or transient whirlpools on a fast-flowing river. The lower and more foundational the assumption, the more its change can affect the rest of the system, since the hierarchy builds off of it. So, the right question—though small—can cause a person, an invention, an idea, an institution, or even a whole culture to change (hopefully for the better, but not always).”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently