Excerpted from the current popular neuroscience book I'm reading,
A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain, by the great
John J. Ratey, M. D.
"The
development of personality itself is firmly
rooted in the sensory apparatus. Even people with
extraordinary perceptual abilities often exist in a
love/hate relationship with their
gifts, because it can be
alienating to "see" the world differently than most people. Yet that
different view is the
defining characteristic of any great artist - indeed, the characteristic that makes each of us unique. The great American architect
Buckminster Fuller, perhaps best known for his creation of the
geodesic dome, often
felt tremendously overloaded by
visual stimulation. He would
routinely wear glasses that allowed only
part of the visual spectrum to
enter his eyes, and when
he put them on he found it
easier to think. When out on a
building site or out for a
stroll in the city,
he would wear earplugs because the
noise left him unable to deal with the world.
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Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (1895-1983) was an American systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist.
Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres. |