Quotes About Perception

It is as if there is another world just waiting to be discovered if only we can learn to see in a new way. Up until the seventeenth century most people in England took little notice of the prehistoric monuments that littered the land. Viewing them as a nuisance, they often dismantled them to clear fields or to provide building materials. Even so, folklore and stories lingered around many of them

In seeking wisdom thou art wise in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool.

People not used to the world … are unskillful enough to show what they have sense enough not to tell.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias. Baruch Fischhoff was the first to document the phenomenon in a set of elegant experiments.

The truth is, the truth is elusive.

People take things differently. What one person would consider a helpful inquiry another might take as an aggressive criticism.

My research collaborator Don Moore points out that police officers spend a lot of time figuring out who is telling the truth and who is lying, but research has found they aren't nearly as good at it as they think they are and they tend not to get better with experience. That's because experience isn't enough. It must be accompanied by clear feedback.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias.

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.

tip-of-your-nose delusions can fool anyone, even the best and the brightest—perhaps especially the best and the brightest.

What make the difference is correctly identifying and responding to subtler information so you zero in on the eventual outcome faster than others.

While 76 per cent of Americans said they watched, read or heard the news on a daily basis, only 41 per cent said they went beyond the headlines.4 So there's this potential illusion of knowing. It is the danger of having a superficial level of knowledge about anything, but believing you know everything.

Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special.

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.

The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what's happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a 'soft language' to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, 'toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.

There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me," to alter the last phrase to "but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.

Einstein himself is reported to have said: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.

Rice University found that people judge sounds that increase or decrease in pitch to be longer than sounds of the same duration and constant pitch. The direction of change does not matter. The amount of change drives the effect.

Simple changes in tone and volume can cause temporal illusions that lead people to believe that more time has passed than really has.

The psychological term for this process is "construal," which refers to the way that each of us understands and explains the world. Once

Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don't understand will be forgotten, too.

IN A CLEAR WAY, WE ARE BOUND TO OUR CULTURE. We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see.

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

What we think has a strong influence on what we feel. John