Quotes & Sayings About Visual Perception

Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, one of the first synoptic articles to come out of his collaboration with Christof Koch at Caltech. I felt very privileged to see this manuscript, in particular their carefully laid-out argument that an ideal way of entering this seemingly inaccessible subject would be through exploring disorders of visual perception. Crick and Koch's paper was aimed at neuroscientists and covered a vast range in a few pages; it was sometimes dense and highly technical. But I knew that Crick could also write in a very accessible and witty and personable way; this was especially evident in his two earlier books, Life Itself and Of Molecules and Men. So I now entertained hopes that he might give a more popular and accessible form to his neurobiological theory of consciousness, enriched with clinical and everyday examples. — Oliver Sacks

The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree. — Johan Huizinga

The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella? — David Papineau

I don't create my images as visual equations to be solved, but rather, i create them as internal landscapes that the viewer can explore. I enjoy sharing the why behind the what, of my creations ... but my way, isn't the only way, to experience them. There is no correct way to interpret them. Perception is reality and yours may be different from mine and that's okay. — Jaeda DeWalt

Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self. — Valerie Steele

I think the responsibility of writers is to convey the feelings that exist in the moment, the moment of that sharp and immediate pang of sour smiles when your heart suddenly starts pumping ice through your veins and becomes difficult and visual perception takes on the appearance of cinematographer on Cops, with unsteady frames and jostling scenes, running through a backyard chasing perpetrators. — Johnny Rico

Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I use visual perception as a way of bringing people into my space. — Richard Artschwager

Psychologists call this cognitive impenetrability: our conscious understanding of the situation is unable to penetrate a compelling perception generated by relatively inflexible mechanisms that interpret visual contours, surfaces, and shapes. — John C. Wathey

What Warcollier demonstrated is compatible with what modern cognitive neuroscience has learned about how visual images are constructed by the brain. It implies that telepathic perceptions bubble up into awareness from the unconscious and are probably processed in the brain in the same way that we generate images in dreams. And thus telepathic "images" are far less certain than sensory-driven images and subject to distortion. — Dean Radin

Hildebrand, too, challenged the ideals of scientific naturalism by an appeal to the psychology of perception: if we attempt to analyze our mental images to discover their primary constituents, we will find them composed of sense data derived from vision and from memories of touch and movement. A sphere, for instance, appears to the eye as a flat disk; it is touch which informs us of the properties of space and form. Any attempt on the part of the artist to eliminate this knowledge is futile, for without it he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absence of movement in his work by clarifying his image and thus conveying not only visual sensations but also those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional form in our minds. — E.H. Gombrich

What sets you apart from the rest of humanity is your ability to give visual form to an idea - the skill to transform it into something more than merely the insight or perception alone. — Richard Schmid

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex. — Sol LeWitt

Its not the eyes, that makes the visualization of the external world possible, but its the perception out of the awareness field. Your eyes are the same, but you view two person differently. — Roshan Sharma

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero. — Aldous Huxley

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests. — Chuck Close

Without claiming superiority of intellectual over visual understanding, one is nevertheless bound to admit that the cinema allowsa number of aesthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment. — Johan Huizinga

Beauty is nature, ugliness is sham perception of fleshy eye lacerated with keenness for visual corporeal thrill. — Akshmala Sharma

Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception. The only way I know how to invite this experience is by removing the other things (i.e., subject matter) for you to think about. — Uta Barth

When I thought of myself, of the feelings I had, of the things I thought I understood so well, I imagined myself somehow abstractly, because that other visual recollection was painful and unpleasant for me. No sooner would I call to mind my physical appearance than the finest, most lyrical, wonderful visions would vanish in an instant - so monstrous was its disparity with the intangible, glittering world that existed in my imagination. It seemed to me that there could be no greater contrast than that between my inner life and my outward appearance; sometimes I even imagined that I was trapped in someone else's strange, almost hateful body. — Gaito Gazdanov

Our visual field, the entire view of what we can see when we look out into the world, is divided into billions of tiny spots or pixels. Each pixel is filled with atoms and molecules that are in vibration. The retinal cells in the back of our eyes detect the movement of those atomic particles. Atoms vibrating at different frequencies emit different wavelengths of energy, and this information is eventually coded as different colors by the visual cortex in the occipital region of our brain. A visual image is built by our brain's ability to package groups of pixels together in the form of edges. Different edges with different orientations - vertical, horizontal and oblique, combine to form complex images. Different groups of cells in our brain add depth, color and motion to what we see. — Jill Bolte Taylor

When judging a product, we rarely have exhaustive scientific data to go by. As a result, if we are to form a complete picture, we must fill in the blanks, just as we must in our visual perception. — Leonard Mlodinow

Teachers should be made aware of visual stress symptoms and the potential difference coloured lights, overlays and lenses could make to a learners perception. — Adele Devine

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. — Josef Albers

A work can do many things at once, and it doesn't have to be just about the world, it could also be about photography, it could be about perception, it could be an exploration of the medium. It could be a document, it could be a visual poetry, and it could be a formal exploration all at the same time. — Stephen Shore

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars - in short a paradox. — Robert Smithson

a site is a creation, not a discovery, and it eludes the visible, cumbersome materiality of objects that embody space. it denatures the landscape of visual perception and implicated another pun: site as citation, the quotation of a constantly deferred real (substantive) place. cyberspace images are themselves citations, visual quotations of particulars, representatives of codes that cannot be visualized. — Alice Rayner

Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite all communicative transactions usurps out customary patterns of exchange, perception is accelerated as well. There does not seem to be a great deal of time left over to infer
or interpret, or imagine
much of anything at all. In the end, of course, there is nothing real about this at all, except for our propensity to let it happen. — Jessica Helfand

Though infested with many bewildering anomalies, photographs are considered our best arbiters between our visual perceptions and the memory of them. It is not only their apparent 'objectivity' that grants photographs their high status in this regard, but our belief that in them, fugitive sensation has been laid to rest. — Max Kozloff

Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the visual perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life. Art contains the allied ideas of making and begetting, of being master of one's craft and able to create. Without these properties no art exists and no photographic art can come into being — Helmut Gernsheim