9 Quotes by Margee Kerr

From the moment we are born our environment is working on us from every level...Who we are is a result of a constant feedback loop between our body and our environment. But we are not entirely hostage to the brain our childhood and parents built; we do have free will, we can make choices, and we can change who we are. Just remember, some people have to work a lot harder and against both biological and environmental obstacles to do so.

But that's the thing with fear: reality often doesn't matter; it's all in the perception.

Halloween was the best holiday, in my opinion, because it was all about friends, monsters, and candy, rather than family and responsibility.

Death has gone from being a community event that bolstered unity and understanding to a quiet and hidden phenomenon, leaving us even more uncertain and afraid of mortality.

There, an engaging tour guide told jokes and made witty quips in between sensationalized and brutal stories of inmates "getting what they deserved" because, as she put it, "if you gonna act like an animal, you gonna get treated like one." (We know, thanks to Goffman and pretty much every behavior study out there, that it often works the other way around.)

Each time we retrieve a memory it is re-created anew...we experience something and encode the facts and associated sensations, which remain stored until they are retrieved, reconsolidated as a memory, and then encoded again. Next time you tell the story you're recalling the memory from the last version you told, not the original "hard copy.

Sometimes I wish I had tried to stay longer, but no matter how long I stayed, nothing would change the fact that I could turn the light back on, stand up, and walk out. I am not a prisoner; I am not trapped. I do have control over my life and my actions.

In fact, the whole place was filled with little conflicts like this: beautiful next to disgusting, free next to confined, compassion next to torture, death next to life.

Viewer-hungry news outlets manipulate our fear response and our brain’s inability to distinguish “real” threats from the abstract and anomalous terrors across the globe that appear within seconds on our smart phones and TVs. We live in an objectively safer world than ever before, but we’re bombarded with fear-triggering messages and worried about issues that likely won’t affect us and are far from our control. We are arguably consumed with fear.