We like to imagine that our brains receive a fully formed picture of the world through our eyes. A series of anomalies — paradoxes, visual illusions, “brain fails” — underscores how wrong this picture is. The brain does extensive reconstructive surgery on all our perceptions in order to create a picture of the world. Here is an illusion that has probably been known in some form for centuries (think Bloody Mary), but only recently been studied experimentally:
To trigger the illusion you need to stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room. The author, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, describes his set up which seems to reliably trigger the illusion: you need a room lit only by a dim lamp (he suggests a 25W bulb) that is placed behind the sitter, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front…
At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included: (a) huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); (b) a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; (c) an unknown person (28%); (d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); (e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); (f) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).
The hypothesis is that tiny visual distortions in the raw data the brain receives causes our visual machinery to imagine for us a totally different picture of the world. This phenomenon is even more prominent in Charles Bonnet syndrome. Patients with this syndrome are not insane, but they experience remarkable visual hallucinations. The patients’ problem lies in their eyes, not their minds: something’s wrong with their eyes or the neural pathway from eye to brain. The brain, ever eager to find meaning in the perceptions it receives, interprets these corruptions of visual data as something meaningful that just isn’t there: gnomes, flowers, roman chariots, monsters, ghosts, anything you can imagine.
I think these results show just how imaginative each and every one of us is, at least on an unconscious level. Rather than receive a pre-formed picture of the world, we must imagine it, every time, using our perceptions as inspiration. Don’t tell me you have no imagination!
dailymeh posted this on September 19, 2010
