Cognitive Interpretation Quotes

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

What we think about Paris is a part of how we feel about it. Our idea of Paris is our idea and we don't know that that's not necessarily the way it really is. It feels so real.

It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you’re doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It’s what you think of it. Two people may in the same place doing the same thing, and yet one may be miserable and the other happy. Why? Because of a different mental attitude.

My bag is approaching something and taking it to another place. Like words-you take a word and by the time you've finished with it, you milk it and you go through the emotion of what it is, what it means there and then.

Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.

All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

The reality we live in is selected by our conceptual definitions. You and I may be in the same physical space, but each of us will see it as entirely different.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the indiscriminate recording of detail.

There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one's nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.

The left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

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

How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head?

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

We are the only beings on the planet who lead such rich internal lives that it's not the events that matter most to us, but rather, it's how we interpret those events that will determine how we think about ourselves and how we will act in the future.

Human perception is literally incarnation.