Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes by Viki McCabe

Systems and their components have a reciprocal relationship that cannot be breached without courting harm to both.  In complex systems, parts and wholes are two sides of the same coin.

Our perceptions typically occur below the level of our conscious awareness and unless we trust our "intuitions" (which are simply our perceptions of structural information), we can easily default to acting on a theory.

Our interdependent perceptual and body-information signaling systems often "know" a great deal more than our rational minds.

Expectancy bias occurs when people expecting something to happen allow this to distort their view of what is actually happening to match their expectations.

His intuition was simply the gut feeling all of us get when we perceive the structural information that specifies and summarizes a complex system or event.  As a result of that perception, we "know" exactly what is going on, even though we are not consciously aware of the information that triggers our feeling of knowing.

Intuition is simply the act of directly detecting structural information on a subliminal level.

We do not perceive things.  We perceive the structural information that reflects an entity's organization and reveals multiple layers of information. 

Our memory is not a reliable recorder of reality; it tends to slot similar items into the same general category to reduce our information load.

The amygdala's primary role, along with the insula and thalamus, is to review what our eyes see and, when necessary, to instantly alert us to its emotional content, especially if that content spells danger.

Over the centuries, all major rivers -- the Yellow, Mekong, Po, Indus, Volga, Tigris, and Euphrates -- have changed their courses by as much as four hundred miles.

When deer graze on sagebrush, the damaged plants emit a particular smell that is detected by neighboring wild tobacco plants.  The tobacco immediately girds up its defenses by emitting an odor that repels deer.  This is more than a two-way conversation between the sagebrush and the tobacco.  It is a three-way relationship among the sagebrush, the tobacco, and the deer.

Evolution is a tinkerer, not a planner, it creates change from whatever is at hand.

Anxiety can further exacerbate our pain because "catastrophizing" the situation recruits brain areas that respond to fear, thereby removing us further from the reality of our actual sensory input.

99% of industrial potato farming in America is limited to one type of potato, the Russet Burbank, because it makes French fries that fit best into McDonald's packaging.

In Glacier National Park in Montana only 30 of the 150 glaciers present in 1850 are still visible.