Quotes About Perception

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.

When we have an experience—hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person.

Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we'll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what's happening in the present.

people's emotions are rarely put into words , far more often they are expressed through other cues. the key to intuiting another's feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels , tone of voice , gesture , facial expression and the like

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. HORACE WALPOLE

A wise man once said all children are born knowing what the angels look like

A wise man once said all children are born knowing what the angels look like. Once we stop fighting against death, we are able to wake up to our lives

Jackson went from the professor's chair to the officer's saddle. He carried with him the very elements of character which made him odious as a teacher but I never saw him in an arbitrary mood.

It's easy to dismiss design - to relegate it to mere ornament, the prettifying of places and objects to disguise their banality. But that is a serious misunderstanding of what design is and why it matters - especially now.

Here's Ohga: "At Sony, we assume that all products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price, performance, and features. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace.

If you believed in the "mediocrity of the masses," as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve.

it is springtime and I am blind"... Clarity depends on contrast - 134

First, we can distance through space. The classic move is known, unsurprisingly, as the "fly-on-the-wall technique.

Ponder that humble toaster. The typical person uses a toaster at most 15 minutes per day. The remaining 1,425 minutes of the day the toaster is on display. In other words, 1 percent of the toaster's time is devoted to utility, while 99 percent is devoted to significance. Why shouldn't it be beautiful, especially when you can buy a good-looking one for less than forty bucks?

Listening to the conversations of those nearby has a bad reputation. But we all do it, so we might as well make it worthwhile. Next time you're in a position to eavesdrop, listen carefully to what your targets are saying. Then imagine yourself as one of those people in that situation. What are you (that is, him or her) thinking and feeling at that moment? What emotions, if any, are coursing through your body? How did you end up in this particular place at this particular time?

generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains."2 The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice.

To oversimplify just a bit, the left hemisphere handles what is said; the right hemisphere focuses on how it's said—the nonverbal, often emotional cues delivered through gaze, facial expression, and intonation.