Sensory Quotes - page 2

Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him-as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness-just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society. (Theodor Adorno)
The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist. ...The ability to grow new synaptic connections as a result of experience appears to have been conserved throughout evolution. As an example... the cortical maps of the body surface are subject to constant modification in response to changing input from sensory pathways. View quote
Eric Kandel
The brain is a complex biological organ of great computational capability that constructs our sensory experiences, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and control our actions. View quote
Eric Kandel
Each sensory system first analyzes and deconstructs, then restructures the raw, incoming information to its own built-in connections and rules-shades of Immanuel Kant. View quote
Eric Kandel
Cajal revealed the precision of the interconnections between populations of individual nerve cells. Mountcastle, Hubel, and Wiesel revealed the functional significance of those patterns of interconnections. They showed that the connections filter and transform sensory information on the way to and within the cortex, and that the cortex is organized into functional compartments, or modules. View quote
Eric Kandel
Because we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space, the representation of space is a quintessentially cognitive sensibility: it is the binding problem writ large. View quote
Eric Kandel
What is learning but a set of sensory signals from the environment, with different forms of learning resulting from different types or patterns of sensory signals? View quote
Eric Kandel
When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses in descriptive value but gains in synthetic value. The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist; so much so that our language, for example is full of diminutives and abbreviations. View quote
Fernand Léger
Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the "real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called "realist” novels - they're nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth - the true feeling of a character - that is all. View quote
Françoise Sagan
In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad. View quote
W. H. Auden
Arthropods and vertebrates share some broad features of general organization - elongated, bilaterally symmetrical bodies, with sensory organs up front, excretory structures in the back, and some form of segmentation along the major axis. But the geometry of major internal organs could hardly be more different... Arthropods concentrate their nervous system on their ventral (belly) side as two major cords running along the bottom surface of the animal. The mouth also opens on the ventral side, with the esophagus passing between the two nerve cords, and the stomach and remainder of the digestive tube running along the body above the nerve cords. In vertebrates, and with maximal contrast, the central nervous system runs along the dorsal (top) surface as a single tube culminating in a bulbous brain at the front end. The entire digestive system then runs along the body axis below the nerve cord. (Stephen Jay Gould)
The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
A schema is a configuration within the brain, either inborn or learned, against which the input of the nerve cells is compared. ...the conscious mind ...can fill in details that are missing from the actual sensory input and create a pattern in the mind which is not necessarily present in reality. In this way, the gestalt of objects-the impression...-is aided by the taxonomic powers of the schemata. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The knowledge of reality, achieved by means of the complete sensory equipment, must be expressed artistically in terms of a medium which appeals to the memory of all sensory experience - but only through the eye. View quote
Hans Hofmann
As with emotionally drawn-out religious initiations, neurobiological studies of stress disorders indicate that subjects become intensely absorbed by sensory displays. The mystical experiences of schizophrenics and temporal lobe epileptics, which may be at the extreme end of the "normal" distribution of religious experience, also exhibit intense sensory activity. These may help to inspire new religions. There is no evidence, however, that more "routine" religious experiences that commit the bulk of humanity to the supernatural have any characteristic pattern of brain activity. View quote
Scott Atran
Religious ritual survives cultural transmission by embedding episodes of intense, life-defining personal experiences in public performances. These performances involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and formulaic utterances that rhythmically synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment. This is often accompanied by sensory pageantry, which further helps to emotionally validate and sustain the moral consensus. View quote
Scott Atran
I had auditory sensory problems and touch sensitivity problems, I had no problems with my vision. Other people absolutely cannot stand fluorescent lighting and they're sometimes helped by a thing called the Irlen colored glasses where you try on all kinds of different pale colored glasses until it's easier to read. It stops the problem of the print jiggling on the page. View quote
Temple Grandin
Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation. View quote
Temple Grandin
The Seventies theory explosion [i.e., Literary theory, deconstruction, etc.] was a panic reaction by headlocked pedants unable to cope with the emotional and sensory flux of the Sixties. It was a desperate search for new authority, new dogma. (Camille Paglia)
9. Even when the sensory objects to be known are in the proximity, when the difference is not taken in, the mind does not cause a break in Yoga. View quote
Ramana Maharshi
We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence. View quote
Sam Harris
My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail. View quote
Laurell K. Hamilton
So What's Left? Let's consider where we are, circa early 2030s. We've eliminated the hearth, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain. View quote
Ray Kurzweil