As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck.

— Gregory C. Carlson

Every question was also an opportunity to create an impression that would guide how all subsequent answers to questions got interpreted.

— Gregory C. Carlson

Learning to be aware of what you unconsciously know may depend on a line of focused effort and specialized knowledge and even some measure of aptitude, but actually learning it may be effortless, automatic, and require very little of what we normally think of as intelligence.

— Gregory C. Carlson

No other species flees from boredom with as much urgency as we do. We are far more eager to do brain work than we are to do physical labor.

— Gregory C. Carlson

Robbed of a rapt audience, advertisers know that influencing how you spend what to do while depends on having some control over how you spend the resources in your head.

— Gregory C. Carlson

Teaching is the art of serendipity. Each of us has the experience of finding out that something we intended as only the most casual of remarks, or the stray example, changes the way some students thought to the point of changing their lives.

— Gregory C. Carlson

The thing about language is that once you start getting analytical about it, you can't stop.

— Gregory C. Carlson

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

— Gregory C. Carlson

When the marketplace became crowded with scores of similar products that mostly did what they were supposed to do, companies focused less on selling that product, and more on selling you a relationship with the product, and a means of announcing your own identity.

— Gregory C. Carlson

Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you're liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with other words.

— Gregory C. Carlson