Maria Konnikova

“Perhaps one day we'll be able to identify and block not just scams but the scammers themselves - before they even target their first victim.”

“Creating groups is easy - but to make them meaningful and lasting, you have to give them a common identity that not only unites them but shows them why they are unique.”

“Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.”

“Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.”

“The fact that insomnia is associated with depression suggests that sleep might help us deal with emotionally stressful or otherwise disruptive events.”

“Finding the one right candidate in a group is hard, and companies don't have much time to figure out exactly which questions can help them tell similar-seeming candidates apart.”

“Many adult bullies hide behind the idea that bullying happens only among children. They conceive of themselves as adults who know better and are offering their hard-earned wisdom to others. The Internet makes that sort of certainty easier to attain: looking at their screens, adult bullies rarely see the impact of their words and actions.”

“It's strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we're sleeping, we're vulnerable - and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive.”

“Once fraternities became tied to power and leadership, the powerful and would-be-leaders wanted to join.”

“I've been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I'm between events and in New York, I'm reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.”

“As our understanding of fraud evolves, we might one day be able to develop predictive algorithms that could identify would-be con artists based on patterns of behavior.”

“I'm capable of just putting my butt in a chair and spending nine hours a day studying poker. I took it as a full time job. So I think that it's a combination of being lucky, but also really studying, working hard and pushing myself to do everything I could.”

“Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.”

“Erik Seidel ended up introducing me to some of the best players in the world, a few of whom also agreed to take me on to coach me. So I had access to the best poker minds in the world to help me study and figure things out.”

“Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren't true.”

“Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.”

“Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all.”

“A wide array of factors can determine just how quickly you'll be able to drift off to sleep when you choose to do so.”

“Cloud Atlas' is but one of a long list of titles deemed unfilmable, by author and movie moguls alike, until it was, well, filmed.”

“The more extreme the story, the more successful it becomes. Emotions on high, empathy engaged, we become primed to help.”