Perceptual Filters Quotes

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

What you experience as "reality," including your physical body and aging, is shaped by your habits of perception.

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others.

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.

We're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. All the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we're willing to listen.

Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?

All my father saw was what he wanted to see.

We live in condensations of our imagination

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

Paradigms power perceptions, perceptions power emotions.

We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model.

We only see what we want to see, and hear what we want to hear

The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.

The human animal only sees what it wants to see.

One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ('a world of identical cases') as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:-we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.

Remember that our reactions are a product of our perceptions, and our perceptions are a result of what is at the center of our life.

The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees - to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.

A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.