Best 5 quotes of Bruce Hood on MyQuotes

As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end.

Fourier's theorem has all the simplicity and yet more power than other familiar explanations in science. Stated simply, any complex pattern, whether in time or space, can be described as a series of overlapping sine waves of multiple frequencies and various amplitudes.

Our self illusion is so interwoven with personal memories that when we recall an event, we believe we are retrieving a reliable episode from our history like opening a photograph album and examining a snapshot in time. If we then discover the episode never really happened, then our whole self is called into question. But that's only because we are so committed to the illusion that our self is a reliable story in the first place.

Every child at some point in time has been told that they must "behave" and when they do not, they are "misbehaving". What parents really intend when they scold their children for misbehaving is that they must learn how to control their thoughts and actions that conflict with the interests or expectations of others. Self-control is a feature of our developing frontal lobes of the brain and is central to our capacity to interact with others. Without self-control, we would never be able to coordinate and negotiate by suppressing the urges and impulses that could interfere with social cooperation. This capacity for self-control is critical when it comes to being accepted and without it we are likely to be rejected - labelled anti-social because we fall foul of the moral and legal codes that hold our societies together.

Unravelling the complexity of human development is a daunting task and it is unlikely that scientists will ever be able to do so for even one individual, because the interactions of biology and environment are likelihoods and not certainties. There are just too many ways that the cards could stack up. More importantly, as the vernacular saying goes, "Shit happens", which is a very succinct and scientifically accurate way of saying that random events during development can change the course of who we become in unpredictable ways.