Quotes About Perception

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.

On Being Sane in Insane Places

Lacking a good explanation, the mind defaults to whatever explanation is on the table, regardless of how improbable it may be.

To experience something, you must be alive, so we cannot personally experience death. Yet we know it is real because every one of the hundred billion people who lived before us is gone. That presents us with something of a paradox.

Photographs and videos are often misperceived and can be easily doctored, and lights in the sky have many prosaic explanations: aerial flares, lighted balloons, experimental aircraft, helicopters, clouds, swamp gas, or even the planet Venus, which, if you are driving on an undulating highway away from city lights, really does appear to be a bright light following your car.

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)

Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.

Oh, I beg your pardon; I do not know—" he stammered. "What to make of me," interrupted the other. "You would therefore do well to believe just what I tell you, or at least to avoid making conjectures of your own, which will lead to nothing.

Oliphant plays with images of windows and mirrors, translucence and opacity, the present and the past.

My mind on this subject is quite made up, and, having the testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer to abide by it.

she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that's true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it—if she wa'n't like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin' everybody without knowin' what it was doin'.

Abrams remembered the old advice to never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. Then, if he doesn't like it, you're a mile away. And you have his goddamned shoes.

Yet, Jesus saw Matthew in a way that no one else saw him. He did not define Matthew by what he was doing, but by the dreams of his heart. He did not see a man for what he was, but what he could be, and he loved him for it. He loved him in a way that produced worship, honor, and love

I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.

I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.

Relationships between things shift and change constantly; there is not such thing as objective truth.

It almost sounds sensible when you say it," Prince First-Born Splendor said. "Even though I know better.

Too many production systems are like Schrodinger's cat—locked inside a box, with no way to observe its actual state.

The answer is simple: it's not the world that is boring and repetitive, it's your mind that is boring and repetitive. Your

Most of us live in a state of perpetual "could be better." We're so used to having control over every little parameter of our lives that we cannot focus on what's going right, only on what's going wrong. That's the viewpoint we always seem to be coming from, and it means that we are perpetually unsatisfied, unhappy, disappointed, and ungrateful.

This definition, which sounds like the opposite of Brahman being the whole universe, is actually identical to brahman being the whole universe, because—in this way of looking at it—everything in the phenomenal universe is an illusion, including your separate self.

We are not born into the world. We are born into something that we make into the world.

Oh, they're always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness," he corrected.