Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

The eye sees more than the heart knows.

You heard me. You ain't blind.

I open my eyes and my ears, and that’s why I work.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

What we hear strikes the mind with less force than what we see.

Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.

I was walking down the street with my friend and he said 'I hear music,' as though there's any other way to take it in. 'You're not special. That's how I receive it too... I tried to taste it, but it did not work'.

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

What happens behind your eyes is more important than what happens in front of them. This is a reversal from the way that we have been taught and the way that we had experienced the world as five sensory humans.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.

The heart lies and the head plays tricks on us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in a way knowing the truth.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

The ear is profound, whereas the eye is frivolous, too easily satisfied. The ear is active, imaginative, whereas the eye is passive. When you hear a noise at night, instantly you imagine its cause. The sound of a train whistle conjures up the whole station. The eye can perceive only what is presented to it.