Quotes About Perception

Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human." That's not true, at least not yet.

There is a strong link between synesthesia and photographic memory (technically called eidetic memory) or at least heightened memory (hypermnesis). Many synesthetes used their synesthesia as a mnemonic aid.

but I always had an incredibly intense sense of smell.

People with synesthesia have their senses hooked together," I started to explain. "They can hear colors or feel sounds. Yours is-well, it looks like you taste shapes.

although what is probably common to all religions is nothing more than the claim that something more exists than what we factually receive through our senses.

When asked what good the trait does, synesthetes immediately answer, "It helps you remember." They do have measurably high memories

The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you can't understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behavior of objects.

objectivity arose from subjectivity—the recognition that two minds could have different representations of the world and that the world has an existence independent of either representation. This

Whether you're heroic or heartless may depend on a contextual factor whose impact is far greater than we would tend to assume.

we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don't understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be.

Zen Buddhist dictum that "the opposite of a great truth is also true.

Every belief about every aspect of the world is based on countless inferences we make via mental processes we can't observe.

It is what man does not know of GodComposes the visible poem of the world.

One man's piety is often another man's poison.

Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities—we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral.

It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It's believing in reality that does us in every time.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.

Understand--it ALWAYS makes sense. Sense can't be avoided. If it first seems to be non-sense, wait: roots will reveal themselves.

There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.