the individuals' personally constructed reality.

"We are so used to looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand what it means not to be alive on it."

Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All, (1963). page 11.

Often it is said that she or he lives in a world all their own. That means we all live in our own isolated world; and to some extent we do create our own view of perception through the senses of smell, touch, taste, sound and seeing. We sense, see, taste, feel or hear so selectively, that we desire to become aware of only features and facets of a far larger world. By retrieving only some signals and paying attention to only a fraction of that information from the enormous range of the world we encounter, people screen out the wider scope of experiences.

While clearly the world is beyond our vision of it, the German gestalt psychologists acknowledged that to a limited extent each individual reconstructs the world in congruence with their own prejudices, biases and comforting or reassuring experiences.

"The division of the perceived universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary. But no necessity determines how it shall be done."

Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, p. 42.

 

 

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