Galen Rowell Quotes

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.

99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room.

I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.

The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

The thing is that pictures are everywhere. The question is what we don't see, and why don't we see so much. I just see it.

Replacing human vision is more than just a tool: we need to understand how that affects the brain.

What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

I have always had a predominantly visual approach to my environment.

No amount of technology is going to change the fact that people process information visually.

The reasons why images are so primal and people immediately relate to it is that we are exquisitely engineered to interpret information that is arrayed in two dimensions. That's our eyesight. That's how our eye-brain system works. So it immediately feels to us when we look at an image like we have extended our senses.

Film is a game of projections upon projections, and the projected image on the screen is a game of light and shadows. There is nothing there; it is the brain that is decoding those things. The film doesn't have any decipherable kind of meaning if it's not seen.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?