A Quote by Tom Vanderbilt

Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.

Tom Vanderbilt

Quote Topics

Asked Attention Best Beyond Certain Circumstances Entity Experiment Fatal Fluid Fragile Happens Human Interesting Less More Psychological Threshold Traffic Well

Quote Author

Tom Vanderbilt
American - Journalist
Born: 1968

It's interesting what happens when you take on a role, I think. What happens to me - without sounding too spiritual or too hippy, I guess - what happens, most of the time, you do a lot of research, and you get into the character, and at a certain moment, it's like the character takes over.

Sylvia Hoeks

Yeah, anytime anybody has a kid, you know how you feel when you have a kid, you look at the world differently because your kid's in the world now. When it's just you, whatever happens happens but now you pay more attention to political things. You pay more attention to things because your daughter or your son has to deal with these circumstances.

Jamie Foxx

We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman, happens to the human. What happens to the outer world, happens to the inner world.

Thomas Berry

When people are too present, too familiar or too in our face, something happens to us psychologically. We begin to tune them out, we begin to get sick of them, we begin to know them so well and become so familiar with who they are that we loose a bit of respect for them. You pass a certain threshold with the fact that you're too present in their lives, too much in their face and once that threshold is passed you're never going to repair it they have lost a certain respect for you.

Robert Greene

Conservatism, I believe, happens to be what happens when people behave according to a certain moral code, a certain sense of right and wrong, people that are accepting responsibility for themselves. Conservatism is what happens when you're a good citizen.

Rush Limbaugh

It happens a little bit more in the West, where there's more fluid - where everybody's originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it's a bigger social cost.

Michael Emerson

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

Seamus Heaney

The best complement I ever got from the public or producers or directors is that I just totally blend in and become the character and they don't notice me and that the play happens or the movie happens or the TV show happens.

J. K. Simmons

The best compliment I ever got from the public or producers or directors is that I just totally blend in and become the character and they don't notice me and that the play happens or the movie happens or the TV show happens.

J.K. Simmons

For most human beings, if what they want happens, it is a success. If what they could not have imagined happens, it is luck. If what nobody could foresee happens, it is a miraculous existence.

Jaggi Vasudev

No doubt other writers have often put a thing more brilliantly, more subtly than even a very cunning artist in words can hope to emulate, a supreme phrase being a bit of luck that only happens now and then. And inasmuch as the condiments and secret travail of human nature are always the same, and that certain psychological moments must ever and ever recur, what more tempting than to pin down such a moment with the blow of a borrowed hammer?

Ethel Smyth

Necessity is not the mother of invention. Knowledge and experiment are its parents. It sometimes happens that successful search is made for unknown materials to fill well-recognized and predetermined requirements. It more often happens that the acquirement of knowledge of the previously unknown properties of a material suggests its trial for some new use. These facts strongly indicate the value of knowledge of properties of materials and indicate a way for research.

Willis R. Whitney

It is not what happens that determines the major part of your future. What happens, happens to us all. It is what you do about what happens that counts.

Jim Rohn

Now, you'll hear people call here on my show claiming they used to be lib and they've changed their minds. That happens, but it happens naturally. It's not because I've focused on trying to persuade people. I think while it's a noble objective to try to help people to see things the right way, this is a different psychological collection of human beings, and they are walled off from anything that's not them.

Rush Limbaugh

With the films, it starts off with certain coordinates in the world and seeing what happens. What happens if you place yourself at an oil refinery in the Middle East? What happens if you place yourself in the White House Cabinet Room? What happens if you place yourself with Brad Pitt on the set of a film? And so on. And no matter what I capture, there is a sense of déjà vu to it, like you might have come across this visual before.