Quotes About Perception

Sex doesn't sell anything other than itself

When we brand things, our brains perceive them as more special and valuable than they actually are.

When you surrender to apprehension, or worry, or nerves, you effectively place a filter over your senses and are no longer able to see what's right in front of you.

for all the valuable insights big data provides, the Web remains a curated, idealized version of who we really are.

In general, we hang things—paintings, posters, mirrors—at the height where we best appreciate them. A painting is always slightly higher than the direct approach. We hang mirrors in such a way that we take in our faces, hair, neck and shoulders.

On a larger cultural level, where we live also determines our timeliness. For example, in Australia, you can be assured that your guests will show up thirty minutes late, often with friends in tow that they haven't told you about. In Switzerland, guests are always on time, and if they plan on being five minutes late, they will let you know. Japanese guests will show up a half hour before they are supposed to, and in Israel, they will be forty-five minutes late. Our

Westerners who've never traveled abroad don't realize the extent to which American movies and actors, and Hollywood imagery, dominate overseas cinemas and markets.

Denmark shows up regularly on magazine and online lists as "the happiest nation on earth," yet every year tens of thousands of business professionals leave the country. In a nation of only 5.6 million people, where one in four Danish women admits to suffering from high degrees of stress, its hard not to believe that some lists can be misleading. Denmark

Other studies have shown that when people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within ninety seconds, between 62 and 90 percent of that assessment is based on color alone.

If a living place can be likened to a city, the art on the wall, or the lack of art, is the first sign

In early 2007, in response to countless customer complaints, Brussels Airlines reluctantly altered the thirteen dots in their airline logo to fourteen.9 If you want to sit in the thirteenth row on your Air France, KLM, Iberia (or for that matter, Continental) flight, you're plain out of luck, as there isn't one.

Whenever I visit the United States, for example, one of the first things I notice is that no one ever touches one another, especially the men. In America, touch is perceived as sexual. At the same time, American culture overemphasizes sports, especially football, which is one of the few places where men are given permission to touch, slap, wrestle, tackle and hug one another.

When we read a book, these specialized cells respond as if we are actually doing what the book character is doing."5

The houses and communities in North Carolina were more upmarket, carefully choreographed versions of the ones I had seen across the Russian Far East. How different, after all, is a look-alike house from a look-alike apartment building?

de-couple the animals themselves from the products on sale. This is a rule of thumb in the United States, but nothing you would ever see in Europe. Europeans have known extensive food shortages, and rationing, and Americans, fortunately, never have. When US tourists visit a marche or charcuterie in France, many are startled and even repulsed by the displays of meat and fowl

French and Italian hospitality industries, food service employees take pleasure in being the best at what they do. They may be the finest oyster shucker, the most knowledgeable vintner, an expert cheese purveyor. Toiling in an American supermarket is widely presumed to be a stopgap job, seldom a vocation.

student Theaetetus to imagine the mind as a block of wax "on which we stamp what we perceive or conceive." Whatever is impressed upon the wax, Socrates said, we remember and know, provided the image remains in the wax, but "whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know."1 A metaphor so suggestive and widespread that we still say that an experience "made an impression.

Across many parts of the Western world, salt and pepper shakers take up a prominent space on kitchen and dining room tables. As everyone knows, most are uniform in appearance: three pinprick holes on the saltshaker, and a single one atop the pepper. If you live in Asia, however, the number of holes is reversed, with three on the pepper shaker and one on the saltshaker, thanks to the popularity of pepper in Asian countries and the cultural preference for soy sauce. This

men and women have two ages: a chronological age, and an emotional age they feel inside. (I'll explore this subject in more detail in a later chapter.) Men typically conceal evidence of their younger selves in drawers, or buried inside online folders, whereas women are less embarrassed about publicly showcasing their younger selves, and express it openly

Just as he loved sweet scents and fragrance in general, so also he was exceedingly sensitive to the slightest unpleasantness of odour, especially in the breath, in himself and in others.

It is the only way of meeting the deadline, they think.

Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.

I compare it with a lie, which like to a snowball, the longer it is rolled the greater it becomes.

a quite novel kind of grammar and logic, according to which what is something is nothing