“It may be that the human brain not only perceives but stores the essentials of a visual scene using the same geometrical, quasi-symbolic, minimalist vocabulary found in maps.”

— Alan MacEachren

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 171

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It may be that the human brain not only perceives but stores the essentials of a visual scene using the same geometrica…" by Alan MacEachren?

Alan MacEachren 23

American geographer 1952

Related quotes

“We can… treat only the geometrical aspects of mathematics and shall be satisfied in having shown that there is no problem of the truth of geometrical axioms and that no special geometrical visualization exists in mathematics.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

“What is essential is whether it is perceived and not whether it exists. To exist and yet not to be perceived is the same as not exist.”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 77, p. 481

“Graphic representation constitutes one of the basic sign-systems conceived by the human mind for the purposes of storing, understanding, and communicating essential information. As a "language" for the eye, graphics benefits from the ubiquitous properties of visual perception. As a monosemic system, it forms the rational part of the world of images.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 2

“We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Source: River out of Eden (1995), Ch. 5: The Replication Bomb

“The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map…”

Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher

Edition:Institute of General Semantics, 1995, p. 58.
Science and Sanity (1933)

“But how can we avoid the use of human language? The… symbol. Only by using a symbolic language not yet usurped by those vague ideas of space, time, continuity which have their origin in intuition and tend to obscure pure reason—only thus may we hope to build mathematics on the solid foundation of logic.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

p, 125
Number: The Language of Science (1930)

“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey… but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Science does not speak of the world in the language of words alone, and in many cases it simply cannot do so. The natural language of science is a synergistic integration of words, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps, equations, tables, charts, and other forms of visual and mathematical expression… [Science thus consists of] the languages of visual representation, the languages of mathematical symbolism, and the languages of experimental operations.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Jay Lemke (2003), "Teaching all the languages of science: Words , symbols, images and actions," p. 3; as cited in: Scott, Phil, Hilary Asoko, and John Leach. "Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science." Handbook of research on science education (2007): 31-56.

“In this chapter I shall collect those Theorems in the Differential Calculus which, depending only on the laws of combination of the symbols of differentiation, and not on the functions which are operated on by these symbols, may be proved by the method of the separation of the symbols : but as the principles of this method have not as yet found a place in the elementary works on the Calculus, I shall first state? briefly the theory on which it is founded.”

Duncan Gregory (1813–1844) British mathematician

Source: Examples of the processes of the differential and integral calculus, (1841), p. 237; Lead paragraph of Ch. XV, On General Theorems in the Differential Calculus,; Cited in: James Gasser (2000) A Boole Anthology: Recent and Classical Studies in the Logic of George Boole,, p. 52

“Visual forms are not perceived differently from colors or brightness. They are sense qualities, and the visual character of geometry consists in these sense qualities.”