Human Perspectives are subjective.

Mara Mara
MARA Notes
Published in
1 min readMar 10, 2020

In an interview explaining the scene construction in “The Dark Knight”, Christopher Nolan talks about the usage of a Shepard Tone to mount the tension in a well constructed scene further enhanced by human imagination heavily influenced by the background score. The auditory illusion known as the Shepard Tone, is created by three ascending tones. A higher tone that becomes quieter, a middle tone that has has constant loudness and a lower tone that become louder. The brain is tricked by hearing two tones that are always ascending. Similar there are optical illusions that trick us.

The illusions in the image and auditory regimes reveals to us insights on how mind perceives its world. Our minds sees images and sounds relative to each other and makes an imagined prediction of a progression even when that progression does not exist. It is very difficult to override this and stop an incorrect reconstruction from happening, largely due to our deep instrumentations and convenient rationalizing based on priors.

This shares an important insight. Humans learn using our existing priors. The human brain uses reinforcement learning (RL) systems, driven by dopamine releases, typified by a standard model of incentivized learning and another system found in the prefrontal cortex, typified by dynamic learning. The standard model uses its learning from human priors to guide the dynamic learning of the prefrontal cortex.

So, what we see is largely influenced by our priors.

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