Quotes About Perception

Part of the answer is that Sandy Hook was a single event. The murders in Chicago are more of a steady background noise. We're constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses.

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn't just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

Closer to the Pallotta case, they also found that subjects judged someone more harshly for running a charity for profit than for running a corporation for profit.

If you ask one group of people whether they will participate in a charity that involves a five-mile run (grueling) and a second group whether they will participate if the event involves a picnic (pleasant), the people in the first group are more likely to agree.

trials they were asked, "How happy are you right now?" The main predictor of reported short-term happiness wasn't how much the subjects were making; it was how much they were making relative to their expectations. Momentary pleasure and pain are, at least in part, relative experiences.

It turns out, then, that if you think something is really going to hurt and it hurts just mildly, the magic of contrast can cause this mild hurt to transform into pleasure.

When experts insist that their societies are awash in misery, they are unknowingly illustrating one of the big findings in happiness research, which is that people underestimate how happy other people are—we tend to think of ourselves as lucky exceptions.

Greater Effort Increases Perceived Value in an Invertebrate," Journal of Comparative Psychology

Regardless of their sex, good-looking faces light up the brain

When an American comes, he or she is often assumed by Africans to be credible and authoritative. This is part of the advantage Mutebe warns against losing.

An African leader and I were talking about our various perspectives on the involvement of the United States in several global conflicts.' He startled me with this observation: "From most of the world's perspective, the USA doesn't have friends in the world; it has `interests.

She was saved from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze.

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

Paradoxically, pain seems like something done to us, though in reality we have done it to ourselves, manufacturing the sensation. Whatever we might conceive of as "pain" occurs in the mind.

Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.

From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self-- feelings, thoughts, memories-- are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.

Cosmology and neuropsychology have absurdity in common. The raw facts are strange beyond imagination.

When we see the brain we realize that we are, at one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.

This is the left hemisphere confabulating. It does this for all of us, every waking moment. It edits our conscious experiences, makes them comprehensible and palatable. It's the brain's spin-doctor.

The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.

The succession of thoughts appears in time, but the gap between two of them is outside time. The gap itself is normally unobserved. The chance of enlightenment is missed.

The world suddenly vanished from view like a morning mist. I was left alone with Reality.

What the first Seer found and recorded thousands of years ago, the last Seer finds and agrees with today. But what the first scientist of the nineteenth century found and recorded, the last scientist of today laughs at and flings aside. The

The second is to grasp the essential nature of the ego and of the universe and to obtain direct perception that both are nothing but a series of ideas which unfold themselves within our minds.