Steven Pinker Quotes

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

We see the moon, don't we? So it's our eye. Animals see us, don't they? So we're their animals.

I'm fascinated with what an audience will take away from an image.

It has been said that 80% of what people learn is visual.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Pictures are as evocative to me as smells.

Men are visual creatures.

No amount of technology is going to change the fact that people process information visually.

The reasons why images are so primal and people immediately relate to it is that we are exquisitely engineered to interpret information that is arrayed in two dimensions. That's our eyesight. That's how our eye-brain system works. So it immediately feels to us when we look at an image like we have extended our senses.

Oceans of emotion can be transmitted through a text message, an emoji sequence, and a winking semicolon, but humans are hardwired to respond to visuals.

I should say that I am a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears... to my constant regret.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre - but real - perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind's eye for up to a few minutes before fading away.

Magic's about understanding - and then manipulating - how viewers digest the sensory information.

Every view, and every object I studied attentively, by viewing them again and again on every side, for I was anxious to make a lasting impression of it on my imagination.

The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.

No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.

Everything for me is visual. That's just how my head works.

It's a visual world and people respond to visuals.

I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That's why I like pictures.

Because of this the representation I'm interested in is of those things only the eye can touch.

99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room.

One of the fastest things a fruit fly does is take information from its eyes and react accordingly.

You think you're looking at things all the time, but you're not looking at things, you're looking at what your brain is interpreting through light and color. And who knows what everybody else sees?