perception Quotes

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.

We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.