On isolation, heuristics and pitfalls

Let me start in an unconventional way (I guess I already have). This post might anger you, or it might get you in denial, or (I hope) might get you curious and have questions which you would look for answers to.

Today’s post is about how the brain interacts with the outside world, how it makes sense of it, why it operates in that way, and where it can go wrong. It already sounds like a heavy topic (and maybe a long one), but brace yourselves, this can be a very fun ride. I’ll spare you, then, a long introduction, so we can get to the juicy part.

Every day, we wake up, usually trying to silence the alarm, use the bathroom, brush our teeth (not all of you; you know who you are), and go to work. At lunch break, you have your meal, which you usually prefer it to be tasty. You look outside the window, see the traffic jam. Later, you leave your workplace, and maybe head back home, or go meet up with some friends and have a few laughs. Later still, at home, you put on your soft PJs and rest your head on that comfortable pillow to end this day.

Except that’s entirely wrong. Hold on, I’m not saying you’re hallucinating; what I’m saying is that the actions actually happened, but everything about your perception of every detail of that day is not what you think it is, and here’s why.

As usual, I love talking about the senses. Why wouldn’t I, since they’re our primary way of acquiring information about the world around us for us to process, store in memory, or make a decision on how to act.

Let’s start with sight, since it’s the sense we rely on the most, and the one the brain dedicates the most processing to. Sure, some people are born blind, while others might go blind for various reasons at a later stage in their life, and these people manage to go about their lives and live as long as someone who never lost their sight, however, we can’t deny the fact that this is a hassle to live with, and they have to rely on much more from their other senses to lead their lives, and sometimes requiring the aid of other people. These people are not who I will be talking about in this section. Instead, I’m addressing people who have not lost their sense of sight.

By definition, “seeing” is receiving information about the shapes and colours of objects around us (be it inanimate or animate objects, including other humans). That being said, when we “see” something, it is not the world around us that is interacting with our brain, rather, our brain interacting with itself using mechanisms it has developed over the years to be able to make sense and navigate the world around us. What happens is, and most of you know this, rays of light reflected from the object hit our retina, and depending on which colour of the light that object absorbs, we see the remaining colour that is reflected. A rose appears to be red because it absorbs most of the visible spectrum, except the red waves. Now to the part that (maybe) most of you never thought of or never knew: the eyes don’t transport these rays inside the brain. What happens is that the “sensors” on our retina receive this light, and fire a specific electric signal to the part of the brain responsible for processing vision. Each shape and colour have a different signal, which is how the brain “knows” what it’s looking at.

To keep things short, I will not go in detail about every other sense, however, the point is that all senses act this way: hearing is not the wave that enters your brain, rather, the signal from your ear receptor being sent to the brain. Smelling is not the gas entering the brain, rather, a signal from the nose reacting to a certain gas. Taste is not the food entering your brain, but signals from your taste buds. And finally, touch is not the object touching your brain, rather, the nerves sending a signal in response to the skin interacting with said object.

The only things that usually enter your body are stuff like food when digested and absorbed by the intestines, and air when the lungs extract the oxygen. Even then, as you know, we’re not letting the entire food or air inside our body, but our body is selective, breaks down these things and only takes what is necessary for its survival. The last two exceptions, which enter our body in their entirety are the serum from IVs and drugs that are directly injected into the bloodstream.

That being said, we now see how each of us experience a different reality. This is why colour blind or people with astigmatism for example see the world differently than we do. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, and I mentioned a verse I like from one of my favourite songs: “you’ll be sleeping on the pillow where the night becomes her hair”. Once I told him how my mental image/scene of that verse was, he proceeded to tell me that this is entirely different than how he sees it. Each one interpreted it differently, even though we were hearing the same “words”.

And what is music if not one of the main pillars of art. Have you ever wondered why almost everyone seems to have a different interpretation of the same painting, or piece of music, or all other forms of art? It’s because they don’t necessarily experience it the same way you do. Some ears are better adapted to better hear certain frequencies of the audible spectrum: Some hear the bass higher than others, while those others hear the treble higher as a quick example. This creates a different version in our brain originating from the same input. This is the same across all other senses. There is a video by VSauce (which I urge you all to subscribe to his channel, he talks about many interesting topics) which touches on the subject:

Now, some food for thought. If every person’s reality is different, depending on their biological anatomy, what does that tell us? Personally, I think this teaches us that at most times, we agree on things that otherwise we might disagree on, that tolerance is not only about concepts like “thou shall not kill”, but also about how we see the world: to each their own, and we can agree on outer events while we might disagree on internal ones. It seems that there is no objective reality, and, even though some “gurus” like to use quantum mechanics to say that “we create our own reality” (which doesn’t apply in this case), they got it half right. We do create our reality, based on how we see the world.

This now brings us to another topic, intimately related to what we’ve been discussing so far, but one that follows an entirely different mechanism. Heuristics. In short, heuristics are certain shortcuts the brain takes in order to free itself from the heavy processing of otherwise very complex actions.

To give you one of the most known examples, one which we’re subjected to at all times: the illusion of continuity when it comes to vision. Whenever we watch a movie, or whenever we’re playing a video game, we get the feeling that we are watching a continuous stream of “video”, while the majority of us know that this is not the case. This illusion is created by changing images, called “frames”, at a very fast speed. In the case of movies, a minimum frame rate of 24fps (frames per second) is needed to create this illusion of continuity. A bit below that, and we feel the video being “choppy”. Go even less, and you start seeing individual images. In video games, and to create smoother motion, a minimum frame rate of 30fps is used, and today, many games process video at 60fps.

Again, the same thing applies for other senses: a series of beeps can be heard as individual beeps, but shorten the time interval between the beeps enough, and eventually you’ll start hearing a continuous sound (like the ones we’re used to in movies when a person dies in a hospital). Another example if you will, a series of taps on your skin, and with shortened intervals, the feeling transforms into a continuous “press” of the skin.

These are what we call heuristics. There are a lot more that the brain uses, most of which many of us are not aware of, and I’ll be saving one very crucial example (about memory) for a section below for a specific purpose.

However, these heuristics are prone to pitfalls. Because the brain is using “shortcuts”, sometimes it gets things wrong.

A crucial heuristic for survival is the focusing of attention. When a sudden important event occurs in front of us, the brain focuses the attention on that event in order to assess if this event would affect us negatively, thus allowing us to escape danger and survive. If a person trips in front of you, you will focus your attention on that sudden movement, temporarily disregarding the rest of the environment. The illusion of time slowing down when we are in a dangerous situation, for example during a car crash, is coming from this: the brain focuses its attention to the maximum on the environment, taking in way more details than usual in the same period of time, giving us the illusion that time slowed down. This effect isn’t always involuntary though: sometimes, we do it to ourselves willingly. Check this video for example:

Almost no one notices the bear from the first run of the video, and it isn’t until we’re told that there is a bear and we rewind that we see it. This goes to show how the human brain is not entirely sure of everything that is being reported to it by all senses, in order to process one sense that has a higher priority at that specific moment. Another quick mention is change blindness, where people don’t see the difference when details are changed when distracted for a very short amount of time:

Studies have also shown that memories are highly dependent on heuristics. The brain doesn’t record all the events in the memories we recall, rather, just some important details, like landmarks or events that marked us, and mainly, the emotion we had at that time, and usually fills the rest by “re-construction”, or how it thinks things should have processed based on these elements that were saved. Normally, this is not a huge deal, as most our memories are of personal experiences, and we remember them, even if a bit distorted, through the emotion we had at the time. However, that heuristic also has pitfalls, and one can alter people’s memories by planting different events or actions that belong to one of their memories than those that actually occurred. You can plant a new memory in a person’s head which they had never experienced. We can even do it to ourselves: the best liars are those who keep telling themselves the lie until they fully believe it themselves. You can see it as some form of brainwashing about someone’s past.

We have many of these pitfalls, and you may look them up online. To give a very well known example: magic illusions. When we go watch a “magician”, we know they’re not doing real magic, but they’re using illusions in order to give us the impression of unnatural behaviour. What these illusionists are doing is exploit our brain’s heuristic pitfalls to give us a good time. I’ll let Neil Degrasse Tyson take over this part:

(Note: I intended to embed the video between 5:40 and 10:30 , but Youtube doesn’t seem to support an end time anymore. And while the entire thing is very interesting, the part I am most interested in to relay my message is between those two time marks)

This is to say that things are not always what they always seem at first, that we can (and will) be wrong countless times throughout each and every day. But wrong is not the only thing we get from these heuristics. As with the first part, these heuristics help create different realities for each different person. This is why we have a wide array of tastes, interests, principles, and so on. To say that there is one absolute objective reality could be wrong. Sure we can describe the trajectory of the planet’s rotation around the Sun with a mathematical formula, but this formula describes how we perceive that motion as, not necessarily how things, in objective reality, happen. I could say that sometimes contradicting ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive, because each person interprets them differently.

And last but not least, as I want to redeem myself from angering or disturbing some of you, consider the following: it’s not all sinister, and we’re not entirely trapped within as I may have probably made it sound. While it’s true that almost nothing gets inside, I haven’t spoken about what gets outside. Creation and self expression through imagination or emotions are means to really interact with the outside world. When we write literature, we put it down in words on pieces of papers for the world to see and experience. It becomes part of the world, and not just a thought inside our head. Expressing ourselves through music, or even just the act of talking are nothing but windows into our souls and our heads, telling people how we saw and interpreted events that we’ve gone through, our realities, and our logic. We shape the world just as much as the world shapes us: as within, so without.

This also goes to show that disagreeing is not necessarily a bad thing, or an act of aggressiveness, rather, a window that each person opens for the other to take a peak inside what’s happening in their head. Always agreeing can be dull, which is why arguments usually spice up relationships, or sparkle debates such as in science and politics, or be a motivation for someone to expand their knowledge. I know I have used the latter to quench my thirst and curiosity for knowledge and self development.

So let’s not invoke negative emotions when we disagree, rather, let’s see it as an opportunity to discover something new, to discover people’s realities, and discover ways of thought we might have never experienced otherwise.