Torsten Wiesel Quotes

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

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain.

We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn't know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that's very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years.

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

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.

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

In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy, and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt - "perceived." But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity.

The human brain has left and right brain symmetry with its own nature and can process information which initially appears to have no pattern or order. However, the brain has the ability to process visual information much more efficiently.

Without images we can neither think nor understand anything.

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.

Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

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.

As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a "giant pattern detector." If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true.

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

The most complex object in the known universe: brain, only uses 20 watts of power. It would require a nuclear power plant to energize a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts. So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that's a compliment.

The brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

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.

The organ of perception acts more readily than judgment.

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.