Senses To Brain Quotes & Sayings

I'm not sure," she said. "There's no one answer to that. You have to
find your own way. Sometimes I try to erase myself. I imagine a big
pink soft soap eraser, and it's going back and forth, back and forth,
and it starts down at my toes, back and forth, back and forth, and
there they go-poof!-my toes are gone. And then my feet. And then my
ankles. But that's the easy part. The hard part is erasing my senses-my
eyes, my ears, my nose, my tongue. And last to go is my brain. My
thoughts, memories, all the voices inside my head. That's the hardest,
erasing my thoughts." She chuckled faintly. "My pumpkin. And then, if
I've done a good job, I'm erased. I'm gone. I'm nothing. And then the
world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl. — Jerry Spinelli

People link the heart to stupidity. They say the heart wants what it wants; it is foolish and driven. They play the victim and blame their emotions for every pain they suffer. The truth is that we own our body.. Therefore we own our heart and it will feel whatever we attract to it. Be certain that the heart you call stupid has greater sense of intuition than brilliant minds combined. It aches, dreams, hates, loves independently; while the rest of your body awaits signals from the brain to function. The heart is the lighthouse that guides all our senses and it is the essence of our humanity. That is why when they say "follow your heart" it is never easy; because by doing so you've made a choice to follow a natural unexplainable genius that is beyond your comprehension. — Asrarabdulghani

I spent the rest of my day picturing how I'd kill Amy. It was all I could think of: finding a way to end her. Me smashing in Amy's busy, busy brain. I had to give Amy her due: I may have been dozing the past few years, but I was fucking wide awake now. I was electric again, like I had been in the early days of our marriage...
Andie had screwed me over, Marybeth had turned against me, Go had lost a crucial measure of faith. Boney had trapped me. Amy had destroyed me. I poured a drink. I took a slug, tightened my fingers around the curves of the tumbler, then hurled it at the wall, watched the glass burst into fireworks, heard the tremendous shatter, smelled the cloud of bourbon. Rage in all five senses. Those fucking bitches. — Gillian Flynn

Professor Ramachandran believes this synesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synesthetic small i sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: Little, teeny, petite, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right, then language emerged from the vast array of synesthetic connections in the human brain. — Daniel Tammet

And I think for a moment, because people don't actually ask that very often. They tell me what they think I feel because they've read it in books, or they say incredible things like "autistic people have no sense of humour or imagination or empathy" when I'm standing right there beside them (and one day I'm going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they -- even worse -- talk to me like I'm about five, and can't understand.
"It's like living with all your senses turned up to full volume all the time," I say. "And it's like living life in a different language, so you can't ever quite relax because even when you think you're fluent it's still using a different part of your brain so by the end of the day you're exhausted. — Rachael Lucas

Cortical maps are dynamic, and can change as circumstances alter. Many of us have experienced this, getting a new pair of glasses or a new hearing aid. At first the new glasses or hearing aids seem intolerable, distorting - but within days or hours, our brain adapts to them, and we can make full use of our new new optically or acoustically improved senses. It is similar with the brain's mapping of the body image, which adapts quite rapidly if there are changes in the sensory input or the use of the body. — Oliver Sacks

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you - something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. — George Orwell

The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk if the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest if the brain. — Kathryn Schulz

As the brain and body were shaped by natural selection, consumer goods adapted to the mind through a parallel process of product selection, which has rendered them ever more fluent, expressive, and fascinating to our senses. — David B. Givens

An odd thing about perception is that when we identify some new thing with one or more of our five senses, it is not really, immutably real
it is a passing will o' the wisp, an artifact of the senses and the translations of the brain until we get used to it and we give it a home in our hearts — Nigel Hey

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas. — George Santayana

A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Every instant of every day we are bombarded by information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom. — Tim Wu

LOVE: Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit. Disease of the soul, atrophy of the brain, weakening of the heart, corruption of the senses, poetic lies from which one gets ferociously inebriated two or three times a day in order to consume this precious but stupid life more quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of love. Its the only swindler, after Judas, that can kill with a kiss. — Renzo Novatore

The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, the divine eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. — Zsuzsanna Budapest

I try to see what the dream might be referring to - because the information in the world is being interpreted by my brain which only has the concepts derived from our five senses. So I think of the sequences in my dream as my brain doing its very best to process information in a way it knows I can deal with. — Amy Hardie

To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done. — Sharon Olds

The second wolf dove straight into the free platter. Fibres of flesh ripped apart with the same terrible tearing sound of sacking stretched and broken. Red sprayed. Limbs flailed. The bloody gurgle of a scream tore from Logan's throat as he struggled against gnashing teeth.
The same slow motion bubble slotted over Violet's head, vacuuming the sound.
Time seemed to ripple around her. Her extra senses reached out, screaming as they felt Logan's existence fray. She moved without consideration, Simon close on her heels, his noises numb to her brain. — Rebecca Clare Smith

We do not perceive what is "out ther," rather we perceive what is "in here." Our senses can only inform us of their own status. They can inform us of the elesctrical status of neurons or the physical or the chemical status of the receptors. The outside world is never taken into our consciousness. The outside world is rather our own creation, psychologically synthesized from the mass of sensations that envelope us. In many respects, the ultimate question that perception must ask was stated by John Stuart Mill in 1865. He asked, "What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts?" That remains, perhaps, the ultimate, unresolved perceptual puzzle. — Stanley Coren

Mysteries are like cayenne for the brain. The senses do pick up. Who was Jack the Ripper? Who killed Judge Crater? How did I burn through my paycheck so fast? Such questions can intrigue or infuriate, but the mind snaps to attention. from the Introduction — Rex Stout

The culture and educational system of the contemporary West are based almost exclusively upon the training of the reasoning brain and, to a lesser degree, of the aesthetic emotions. Most of us have forgotten that we are not only brain and will, senses and feelings; we are also spirit. Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope. — Kallistos Ware

The infant needs to develop sufficient muscle tone in order to be able to move around and stimulate this linking together. To establish tone, the infant needs to be touched, hugged, and rocked, as well as being allowed to move around freely. Such stimulation sends signals from the sense organs of the tactile, balance and kinaesthetic senses to those centres of the brain stem that regulate muscle tone. If the baby gets insufficient stimulation from these senses the tone of the extensor muscles will be low.3 This may make it difficult for the baby to lift his head and chest and move around, further reducing the stimulation from the balance, tactile and kinaesthetic senses, leading to a particularly vicious cycle of developmental delay. — Harald Blomberg

We know what it feels like to have our energy drained by too much interaction. It feels like my brain is tired, almost like a muscle would be tired. The more depleted my psychic energy is, the slower my thoughts come, the harder it is to speak full sentences or focus on what's going on around me. My senses become even more sensitive; noise and fuss are more overwhelming. And I become tense, irritated, cranky. That's when I know I need to stop, sit down, let my brain relax and put up its metaphorical feet. — Sophia Dembling

He hadn't been a husband for very long, but upon marriage men get a whole lot of extra senses bolted into their brain, and one is there to tell a man that he's suddenly neck deep in real trouble. Jeannie — Terry Pratchett

When you undergo a visionary experience, what you are really doing is blowing your socially conditioned, 20th century, hive mind and allowing your brain to, literally, come to its senses. — Steve Kubby

The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present - processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it? — Burkhard Bilger

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright ... — Tom Wolfe

I became so desperate that I considered throwing Eric [Beck] off the ledge. I thought I could get down and then lie about what had happened. To my addled brain, this was plausible. Then I came to my senses and woke Eric up and told him that either he had to retreat or I'd throw him off. We went down and I never climbed again for a quarter of a century. — Dave Cook

How could he forget her instructions days ago to deposit all her art supplies in the ballroom? Probably because that brain-muddling embrace outside the gallery scrambled clear thinking. He recalled the distraction of burying his face in the softness of her hair. Her presence seeped into him the same way her simple lemongrass scent invaded his senses. Right now, breathing heavily from exertion, he'd swear her scent surrounded him. — Gina Conkle

Gordon Shepherd MD and PhD at Yale School of Medicine, said this: The industry is geared to over-stimulating the senses of the consumer so that they eat more. The goal is to activate the parts of the brain that are susceptible to being conditioned to finding a product desirable and then wanting more of it. — Scott Abel

I like to think of the senses as having a volume control in the brain. The volume turns up on all the other senses when you lose one. — David Mason

Telepathy' literally means to feel at a distance, just as 'telephone' is to hear at a distance and 'television' is to see at a distance. The word suggests the communication not of thoughts but of feelings, emotions. Around a quarter of all Americans believe they've experienced something like telepathy. People who know each other very well, who live together, who are practised in one another's feeling tones, associations and thinking styles can often anticipate what the partner will say. This is merely the usual five senses plus human empathy, sensitivity and intelligence in operation. It may feel extrasensory, but it's not at all what's intended by the word 'telepathy'. If something like this were ever conclusively demonstrated, it would, I think, have discernible physical causes -perhaps electrical currents in the brain. Pseudoscience, rightly or wrongly labelled, is by no means the same thing as the supernatural, which is by definition something somehow outside of Nature. — Carl Sagan

Chewing gum actually lowers your cortisol levels, the hormone responsible for stress. But chewing gum doesn't just reduce stress, it also makes you more alert and improves your performance in memory-oriented tasks. It does so by increasing the blood flow to your brain and alerting your senses. — Travis Bradberry

People who make use of all their senses in trying times are no less patriotic than those whose restraint is lost, whose senses are dimmed and whose brains are washed. This is also the time for the patriot to say: Enough. — Gideon Levy

I have never written the music that was in my heart to write; perhaps I never shall with this brain and these fingers, but I know that hereafter it will be written; when instead of these few inlets of the senses through which we now secure impressions from without, there shall be a flood of impressions from all sides; and instead of these few tones of our little octave, there shall be an infinite scale of harmonies - for I feel it - I am sure of it. This world of music, whose borders even now I have scarcely entered, is a reality, is immortal. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

You baffle me, addle me, drive me insane.
You muddle, befuddle, and rattle my brain.
My senses are mad,
Skewed judgment to blame.
You drive me half stark-raving bonkers!
(But the truly crazy thing is how I love it.) — Richelle E. Goodrich

I know very little with anything approaching certainty. I know that I was born, that I exist, and that I will die. For the most part, I can trust my brain's interpretation of the data presented to my senses: this is a rose, that is a car, she is my wife. I do not doubt the reality of the thoughts and emotions and impulses I experience in response to these things. . . . Yet apart from these primary perceptions, intuitions, inferences, and bits of information, the views that I hold about the things that really matter to me--meaning, truth, happiness, goodness, beauty--are finely woven tissues of belief and opinion. — Stephen Batchelor

Of all such appeals to sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grown duller. — Henry Beston

That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain. — Susan Jacoby

I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.
No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there. — Charles Bukowski

The pigeon had been unlucky. Ten birds had been on their way back to their Ilkley coop, flying in stolid, heavy formation; nine had returned home. The tenth, flying low over the moor at the base of this avian wedge, had plummeted soundlessly to the soil, its senses overwhelmed by the tendrils of consciousness which had enwrapped them.

When the pigeon awoke, moments later, all of the rudimentary universal constructs which defined pigeonness in its brain had been carefully swept away, save one. The entity didn't need birdseed; it didn't need a pigeon coup in Ilkley; but it needed to fly.

And it needed as much of the pigeon's cerebral activity as possible to focus on getting it to its desired location, which meant that for the first time in its life, this pigeon was reading roadsigns.

It was also experiencing emotions for which it was somewhat unprepared, most notably an insistent, imperative yearning for Leeds United. — Windsor Holden

You see," he said turning to Mr Norton, "he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It's worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn't digest it. Already he is - well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man! — Ralph Ellison

I really felt amazing overall
other than a few minutes ago in the shower. Pushing the thought from my mind, I focused on the positives. My senses were heightened now, like I'd been bitten by Peter Parker's radioactive spider.
Only the guy who bit me was a mutated green beret. And instead of making me into a superhero, he'd doomed me to die of a brain hemorrhage. — Lisa Kessler

The idea of safety had shrunk into particles - one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heightens the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks. — Diane Ackerman

Just as we are blessed with a brain through which we learn and understand, ears with which to hear, fingers and toes and a body through which to feel, and a pair of eyes through which we learn to see, I believe our soul is also blessed with senses. — Catherine Carrigan

Pribram realized that if the holographic brain model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened the door on the possibility that objective reality - the world of coffee cups, mountain vistas, elm trees, and table lamps - might not even exist, or at least not exist in the way we believe it exists. Was it possible, he wondered, that what the mystics had been saying for centuries was true, reality was maya, an illusion, and what was out there was really a vast, resonating symphony of wave forms, a "frequency domain" that was transformed into the world as we know it only after it entered our senses? — Michael Talbot

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing. — Steve Grand

[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. — Tom Wolfe

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge. — Elizabeth Bowen