Perceptual Filtering Quotes

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

As a rule we perceive what we expect to perceive... The unexpected is usually not received at all.

When people do not ignore what they should ignore, but ignore what they should not ignore, this is known as ignorance.

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it.

In every story of solipsism, there is always a conspiracy. Why? Because there is always a background involved in every perception.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites.

If you think there is anything in theater that objectively exists without your point of view attached, you are wrong.

Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.

The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see.

We actually form the world at every instant, although we're not cognitively aware of that but - and there are people would argue with that to some degree.

When I talk with people, I don't even see what they are wearing . . . No, I recognize it if it's something particularly nice and interesting. I see the exception.

Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information - that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/ conditioned reality-tunnel

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.