Perceptions

What is real?

Sometimes, odd things catch the public imagination for a time, and we all wonder what is real, at least within a narrow focus. This week, there has been some fuss about a recording of someone saying a word. People hear the recording differently. Social media have a lot to say about this. Some technical and scientific commentary is printed and shared. I've listened to more than one recording that reportedly is heard differently by different people, or the same people under different conditions. I find it to be a lot of fuss over very little.

A few years ago, there was similar fuss over a picture of a woman in a dress that seemed to change colors, or was perceived as different colors by different people. There were also lots of reports trying to explain the phenomenon.

It is certainly true that our expectations and environment affect our perceptions. There are a lot of studies of sensory systems that demonstrate that, but when such a thing pops up in popular culture, we're still fascinated by it. We want to know which side we're on, and maybe why it happens. But some thought about the structure and function of our sensory systems reveals that these phenomena are a result of how things work.

There is a blind spot in our field of vision. We don't dwell on it, because we don't experience it, unless we set up conditions to demonstrate it to ourselves. Our brains just fill in the blank space, and we don't notice.

We know that film, or video recording in any form, is made up of sequential images. Is it possible that our brains can work around that, and record in actual time, without sequential images? Well, no, not really. We experience the world as smooth, continuous stimulation of many kinds, but the records going to our brains are sequential impulses from neurons, so the phenomenon is similar. It is true that in the case of our sensory systems, we have many neurons involved in almost any sensation we experience, and they are not synchronized, which makes the sensation closer to continuous, and the frequency of impulses for each neuron is very high compared to our perceptions. But we also experience video recordings as continuous, even though we know they are made of sequential images.

So what is the reality? And does it matter? I think the latest excitement over the word recording is silly, but maybe educational for many who don't spend much time thinking about how our brains work, and the limitations and variations built into our perceptions. Maybe a better understanding of these limitations can lead to better technologies, or something. The people working on things like artificial retinas and cochlear implants have to know something about the capabilities of the nervous system to make their creations compatible.

If only we could get people to recognize the difference between fact and nonsense, that would be a real breakthrough. But maybe I'm getting political when I say that.