Richard Axel Quotes

Perceptual reality is different for different species. In certain species it is a mode of observation, so what we call scientific fact is actually not ultimate truth, it is perceptual experience, and it's a mode of observation.

Why does the lizard stick his tongue out? The lizard sticks its tongue out because that's the way its listening and looking and tasting its environment. It's its means of appreciating what's in front of it.

The sense organs experience the external light, sound, etc. with difficulty; the different sense organs only have a so-called specific receptivity for particular stimuli.

Even in the lives of fishes, sensation is seldom a matter of one thing or another. Senses overlap. The lines between them often tend to be blurred, and the best that we can manage, by way of description from the outside, is to say that the senses of fishes appear to dominate one at a time.

The Sun-Paul must consider only one thing: what is the relation of this or that external reaction of the animal to the phenomena of the external world?

A snake knows more about what is happening around than any other creature, because it has no ears to listen to gossip - only direct perception.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

Light has called forth one organ to become its like, and thus the eye is formed by the light and for the light so that the inner light may emerge to meet the outer light.

To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. ... if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.

The eye is the window of the human body through which it feels its way and enjoys the beauty of the world.

Vision evokes emotion. There is no such thing as an emotionless vision.

Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

Self-awareness is your awareness of the world, which you experience through the five senses (sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell). Pay attention to your sensory impressions and be aware of those five ways that the world comes to you.

Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

How fast the ears learned to tell what sounds meant, much faster than it took the eyes to decipher written words.

Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and you're being confronted by different things, not necessarily very important or significance for your ultimate life, but you are constantly reacting to the world.

Dogs need to sniff the ground; it's how they keep abreast of current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard.

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.

It is a mistake, to think the same thing affects both sight and touch. If the same angle or square, which is the object of touch,be also the object of vision, what should hinder the blind man, at first sight, from knowing it?