LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING
Don’t Trust your Senses Blindly
Even our brain makes assumptions
You might already have come across this funny little video, or some version of it. Many will dismiss it, because I think it makes us all a little uncomfortable. I mean, how can you hear different things from the same recording depending on what you’re reading?
This is different to the good, old blue/gold dress viral image (it’s white and gold, by the way). Most people will see the one or the other (some reportedly see both, depending on when they look at the photo), but for most people this doesn’t change on a cue.
However, the word you hear on the recording in question seems to change according to what you read. It worked exactly as advertised for me and not only that, but the weirdest thing happened. I tried a little experiment: I covered the words with my hand, and kept playing the video on a loop. The result was that I heard the word towards which I was looking, even though I couldn’t actually read it. Looking at the left side, I heard “green needle” and when looking at the right side I got “brainstorm”. Again, I wasn’t reading the actual words. My brain adjusted to its “translation” of the sound based on the memory of the word’s location on the screen. And then I read that the sound is supposed to be “brainstorm”. That was it. My brain locked it in as the correct answer and I can rarely hear “green needle” now, even if I intently concentrate on reading the word or thinking it. I didn’t even try to do it, it just happened.
Turns out that if something we hear is unclear or ambiguous, our brain will fill in the gaps and it will choose the most likely version. More or less the same happens with The Dress. Which I lied about, by the way. The actual dress was black and blue, but no matter how much I try, I still see it as white and gold in the original photo. There is some ambiguity about the white: it looks like white fabric in a bluish light (or filter). But for me it’s not even remotely conceivable that the gold could be black!
There are other example of similar phenomena like the Yanny vs. Laurel debate (it’s totally Yanny as far as I’m concerned). This is different, however, in that most people hear just one or the other (with an almost 50–50 split) and those who can hear both seem to be a small minority. This has to do with how people hear specific low or high frequencies rather than concentrating on one of the two words to “guide” our brain.
We always consider being an eye witness to any event to be the pinnacle of objectivity. We say “I saw it with my own eyes.” According to the Bible, our ears seem to be a bit lower on the objectivity scale:
“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye sees You.”
Job 42:5
And then there’s the saying that goes:
“If you didn’t hear it with your own ears or see it with your own eyes, don’t invent it with your small mind and share it with your big mouth.”
It’s sound advice, but still it shows that we trust our senses too much. Centuries of philosophical thought experiments, numerous mistakes in the identification of crime suspects and, of course, scientific research have shown that our senses often deceive us.
This isn’t something that happens occasionally. It happens literally every second of every day. Several times per second, actually. Our brain makes up for the slight delay between the time it takes to process a stimulus by predicting where an object should be, even if it’s not actually there. It’s just a short amount of time, about 120 ms (or 0.12 seconds), but for that fraction of a second our brain tells us its best guess about where physical objects around us should be.
It allows tennis players to respond to a lightning-fast serve or a hunter to shoot an animal with accuracy, but the point is that we’re constantly fed a simulation of reality that autocorrects itself every 120 milliseconds. Our brain constantly filters all our senses and shows us its best estimate of reality. And when it comes to memory, it gets even worse. Our brain “updates” our memories constantly, in an attempt to keep them more useful in the present. It’s all about helping us make good choices in the here and now, rather than accurately recording our past, like a camera.
You see, our brain’s main job is to help us survive rather than objectively record reality. It’s a sobering thought and, perhaps, explains why we often remember things very differently than other people when we have a shared experience. Our version of reality isn’t just subject to the way our brain apparently filters everything on a raw data level, but it’s further coloured by our biases, thoughts, beliefs, our psychological state and our past experiences.
But for (hopefully) thinking animals such as we are, objective reality has great value. We just shouldn’t assume that our own perception of reality is the one and only truth. No matter how hard we try, our viewpoint will always be subjective. I think we should act accordingly.
