Seeing is believing. Not! – The fallible brain
18th Dec 2020
What is the language of our brain?
Everything that we perceive of the external world is through the stimuli generated by our senses; in the form of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Taken together, they give us a picture of our surrounding world.
Among all, our visual system is the most dominant, contributing alone to more than half of our brain’s perception. Seeing is believing. But surprisingly, it is also the most faulty and fallible of all the sensory systems. Optical illusions trick us into seeing things that doesn’t really exist1. If taken a bird’s eye view of how these visual illusions work, it reveals a lot about how we process what we see each day.
Imagine a situation of observing two people engage in conversation. You notice the way they move their hands, the color of their dresses, the words they’re speaking. In this moment, while you’re standing there, you are experiencing the reality as it is unfolding in front your eyes.
Albeit, there is no particular physical space in your brain where that memory gets stored. It is funny how we still believe that we remember everything. As you recollect the conversation, you have forgotten quantum of details, but your brain cannot present you this memory with huge gaps in the information. Because survival! So it quickly fills in the blank gaps with the most likely interpretation of that situation, like betting on the best horse in a race.
How our brain fills these missing gaps is subjected to our experiences and the environment we have grown up in. Remember the image of The Dress that went viral back in 20152? Few people saw it as blue and black, while others as white and golden. When there was gap in processing of the image, our brain simply filled the most likely colors that we are used to seeing around us, dividing the world into two camps.
Exactly why it is said, the reality is but, perception; viewed through, and limited to the functioning of our own mind. This phenomenon happens almost every day in our life, where we are tricked into seeing things that don’t really exist.
Many scientists have tried to study why the functionality of our brain is so fallible?
All the research indirectly hints that our visual system is too limited to process all the information that it receives at one particular time. Rightly described by neuroscientist, Susana Conde, “For that our brain would need to be bigger than a building, and still then it wouldn’t be enough”. And so our minds take shortcuts. It portrays the most likely interpretation of what we see. It makes assumptions to have the most probable layout of our surrounding.
It won’t be crazy to take all our beliefs with a pinch of skepticism. Because, seeing is certainly, not believing.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
-Marcus Aurelis
– Sanketa Raut
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