When we see we guess at the future…

by DRM

The title’s only a lit­tle bit of an exag­ger­a­tion.  Accord­ing to research by Mark Changizi, sum­ma­rized in a great inter­view on Neu­ronar­ra­tive, what we see is our brain’s approx­i­ma­tion of the world in a tenth of a sec­ond, not the world at the instant that we see.

Con­fused?  Here’s an excerpt from Changizi.

When light hits our retina, what our brains would like to do is instan­ta­neously gen­er­ate a per­cep­tion of what the world looks like. Alas, our brain can’t do this instan­ta­neously. Our brains are slow. It takes around a tenth of a sec­ond for your per­cep­tion to be built, and that’s a long time when you’re mov­ing about. If you per­ceived the world the way it was when light hit your eye, you’d be hav­ing a tenth-of-a-second old view of the world.

Because of this, visual sys­tems have evolved mech­a­nisms to try to gen­er­ate a per­cep­tion not of the way the world was when light hit the eye, but gen­er­ate a per­cep­tion of the way the world will be by the time the per­cep­tion occurs in a tenth of a sec­ond. By the time the per­cep­tion is elicited, the antic­i­pated future will have arisen, and the per­cep­tion will be of the present. That is, in order to per­ceive the present (have per­cep­tions at time t that are of the world at time t), our visual sys­tems must antic­i­pate the near-future.

These mech­a­nisms are, I argue, up and run­ning at all times, look­ing for all sorts of cues in the stim­u­lus in an attempt to guess the way the world will change in the next moment.

And this is where “tricks” come in. If we can cot­ton on to the cues your visual sys­tem is look­ing for in its attempt to guess the near future, then we can con­coct arti­fi­cial visual stim­uli hav­ing these cues, but make sure they do not change as they “should” in the next moment. That way, when you look at them, your brain will gen­er­ate a per­cep­tion of what “should” hap­pen next, but it will now be wrong due to the mad, evil psychologist.

This is a pretty cool phe­nom­e­non that in one big swoop explains deja vu — maybe you did see it, but didn’t know you saw it, just a tenth of sec­ond ago — world-class ath­letes — maybe the great hit­ters see the world as it will be in a split sec­ond — and abject ter­ror — what if the world is com­pletely dif­fer­ent in a tenth of a sec­ond than you anticipated!

Changizi also has an inter­est­ing take on writing.

He won­ders how it is that after just 1000 years of writ­ing our brains can be so effi­cient at learn­ing to rec­og­nize let­ters and words.  You would think, he sug­gests, that we’re evolved to read, not that read­ing is a late fea­ture of our skill set.

The solu­tion is that cul­ture made writ­ing easy on the eye, by shap­ing let­ters to be what the eye likes. The idea that cul­ture shapes our arti­facts to be good for us is not new. What’s new here is a spe­cific hypoth­e­sis for what writ­ing should look like in order to be good for us.

To be easy on the eye, writ­ing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illit­er­ate visual sys­tems are fan­tas­ti­cally com­pe­tent at pro­cess­ing. The trick of that research direc­tion was mak­ing this “writ­ing looks like nature” idea rig­or­ous, and com­ing up with ways of test­ing it. I show that there are cer­tain sig­na­ture visual pat­terns found in nearly any nat­ural envi­ron­ment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these sig­na­ture pat­terns are found in human writ­ing. In short, writ­ing has evolved so that writ­ten words look like visual objects.

All I can think about is trees.  Wouldn’t it be hilar­i­ous is peo­ple who live in cli­mates with a win­ter, where they see de-nuded trees for longer peri­ods, were able to learn to read more quickly.

That’s not sci­en­tific.  But it’s an amus­ing thought.

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