GistGist perception happens in the first approximately 300 ms. One gets a gistgist of the room before one identifies specific objects; one sees whether an indoor scene is orderly or disordered—i.e., calm or threatening. And whole scene gist takes place in a separate part of the brain than does object-recognition. Why would our bodies have this mechanism and what does it give us? Philosophy has historically focused on object recognition, particularly interpreted as an analysis of how objects become predicable for us. But if we examine the process of gist perception, a different perspective opens up. For gist involves not just passive absorption of the features of the environment, but also an embodied reaction. For example, we experience the first few milliseconds of the fast-moving, charging rhino and feel fear. These affordancesaffordances are functionally related to the gist experience as it allows for the inductiveinductive generalization from low-levellow-level features (i.e. illumination, color, texture, etc.) that lead to the semantic high-levelhigh-level category. I argue that our bodies are so constituted as to separate out the public, potentially proprietary objects from privatized, unnamed experience. It therefore allows us to think of perception as something other than of entirely linguistically defined objects.