Daniel Gilbert Quotes

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

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

I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.

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.

Some people see what they want to see.

Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.

In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive.... The teacher has forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to see.

Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.

We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.

The things that we want we willingly believe, and the things that we think we expect everyone else to think.

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.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

Humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others.

Men see what they expect to see.

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.

We cannot see what we don't believe.

One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

We can only see what our brain’s filter allows through.