David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas
"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", p. 120
Cloud Atlas (2004), Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (Part 1)
SGU, Podcast #326, October 15th, 2011 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/326 <br class="br">The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2010s <br class="br">Context: In fact, there are many altered brain states where people may have a very vivid experience, or at least a vivid memory of their experience, precisely because they have impaired brain function. When you start dropping some of the higher brain functions out of the loop, like reality testing and things like that, … things can seem hyper-real. That could actually be a sign of brain dysfunction. It's similar to … somebody who is stoned thinking that they are really profound.
David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas
"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", p. 120
Cloud Atlas (2004), Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (Part 1)
“Minds differ in the vividness with which they recall the elements of previous experience”
George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher
The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: Minds differ in the vividness with which they recall the elements of previous experience, and mentally see the absent objects; they differ also in the aptitudes for selection, abstraction, and recombination: the fine selective instinct of the artist, which makes him fasten upon the details which will most powerfully affect us, without any disturbance of the harmony of the general impression, does not depend solely upon the vividness of his memory and the clearness with which the objects are seen, but depends also upon very complex and peculiar conditions of sympathy which we call genius.
Bernard MacLaverty book Midwinter Break
Ch 9 - p.187
Novels, Midwinter Break (2017)
Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Context: A great many people say we have language and imagination to posit creators, interveners, and agencies that we can't actually prove. And yet some people experience God within them--these experiences are not drawn-up hypotheses. It's possible those of us who don't feel God within them have deficient brains that aren't capable of such experiences; or alternatively, the people who experience these things have brains that somehow create them. As near as I can tell, the jury is out on that. I may be a non-theist who doesn't include a god concept in my religious orientation because I have an incompetent brain, or perhaps theists have brains giving them inaccurate information.
Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist
Discussion in The first Conference on The Central Nervous System and Behavior (1958), p. 420 - 421, as quoted in the obituary at the National Academies Press http://www.nap.edu/html/biomems/rsperry.html <br class="br">Context: I have never been entirely satisfied with the materialistic or behavioristic thesis that a complete explanation of brain function is possible in purely objective terms with no reference whatever to subjective experience; i. e., that in scientific analysis we can confidently and advantageously disregard the subjective properties of the brain process. I do not mean we should abandon the objective approach or repeat the errors of the earlier introspective era. It is just that I find it difficult to believe that the sensations and other subjective experiences per se serve no function, have no operational value and no place in our working models of the brain.
Bram Stoker book Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
On a meeting of Richard Francis Burton on 18 September 1886, Vol. 1, p. 230
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1907)
Context: Burton had a most vivid way of putting things — especially of the East. He had both a fine imaginative power and a memory richly stored not only from study but from personal experience. As he talked, fancy seemed to run riot in its alluring power; and the whole world of thought seemed to flame with gorgeous colour. Burton knew the East. Its brilliant dawns and sunsets; its rich tropic vegetation, and its arid fiery deserts; its cool, dark mosques and temples; its crowded bazaars; its narrow streets; its windows guarded for out-looking and from in-looking eyes; the pride and swagger of its passionate men, and the mysteries of its veiled women; its romances; its beauty; its horrors.
James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist
"Before Ethics and Morality" (1972)
“Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.”
T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic
As quoted in Notes of T E Hulme, Imagism & Imagists (1931) by Glenn Hughes