Word: stimuli
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...mossy stone, a frog seems to be thinking about nothing, and in a sense this is true: the frog's brain is too small and primitive for real thought. But its bright, bulging eyes have a keen, built-in intelligence of their own. They select among stimuli and report to the feeble brain only those visual items that are important to a frog's wellbeing. When a cloud drifts slowly over the sun, a frog's eyes do not bother the brain with the meaningless event. But when a bird swoops down, suddenly darkening the sky, special...
...colors, or dates, or shapes, or perhaps most significant, of emotionally important events. Even the senses present puzzling problems. Vision may become poorer, but so subtly that the beset patient does not recognize his difficulty. Or he may be depressed by a general decline in his responsiveness to sensory stimuli, or by a partial failure of his mental computer to pull together the stimuli received through different senses...
...remember that the effect of any stimulus--verbal or nonverbal, artificial or natural--depends upon the set and the setting; your expectations and your environmental situation. Consider such words as "drug" or "doctor" or "dean." Your reaction to such words depends on your set and the situation. Nonverbal stimuli such as consciousness-expanding drugs intensify experience many fold--but their effect similarly depends on the set and setting. Historically, expansive words and expansive drugs often been seen as dangerous and "mind-distorting" and administrators have been pressed to impose controls. But history also teaches us that you can't proscribe...
...your nervous system. If you want to play the labelling game you can call some of these changes dangerous and others beneficial. You can label some artificial and others natural. Compare this to the written word. Can the written word be dangerous? Is the written word natural? Are nonverbal stimuli such as the sacred mushroom of Mexico artificial? Is the chemical essence of the mushroom dangerous...
...most effect on urban populations that have been predisposed to the actions of pollen by such stimuli as auto exhaust fumes, chimney smoke and smog...