Representative Realism

The phrase is most often credited to psychologist Timothy Leary, who developed his eight-circuit model of consciousness in the early 1970s and formalised it in Exo-Psychology (1977). Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Leary as the source, gave the concept its broadest audience in Prometheus Rising (1983), arguing that each person's nervous system constructs a unique model of reality shaped by their experiences. Both drew on Alfred Korzybski's general semantics and William James's observations on selective attention as precursors.