Anthony Doerr Quotes

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

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

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

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

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.

The eye and brain are not like a fax machine, nor are there little people looking at the images coming in.

Neuroscience is exciting. Understanding how thoughts work, how connections are made, how the memory works, how we process information, how information is stored - it's all fascinating.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

Our minds influence the key activity of the brain, which then influences everything; perception, cognition, thoughts and feelings, personal relationships; they're all a projection of you.

I think most people are inherently interested in how their brain works, in what makes them tick.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

You must consider, when reading this treatise, that mental perception, because connected with matter, is subject to conditions similar to those to which physical perception is subject.

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

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we'll never again come close to achieving... we are learning about our world and its possibilities.

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

If you dream you do something, it's as if you actually are doing it from your brain's point of view.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.

Our senses perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our awareness forces them to do so...because we learn what to perceive.