Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  Environmental causes also create behavioral bias. Studies show that our “shadow characters,” which means behavioral tendencies we try to conceal from public eye, come to life when the light is dimmed. It seems dim illumination tends to illuminate our “shadowy personality”; those aspects of our personality we consider unattractive step, with the diminution of light, to the front of the stage. When the illumination is dimmed, the moral level of our behavior tends to go down. Participants of a study who were observed in dim illumination, or those who were equipped with sunglasses in broad daylight, were less fair toward their peers compared to subjects who were observed in intense illumination with harsh light. A dark environment makes us feel hidden, and as a result we tend to reveal darker parts of our personality, like young children who believe that when they close their eyes, others cannot see them.

  Perception Seasons of the Sensory Organs

  Calibration of the perception skills of our sensory organs changes along various time axes. In general, it is possible to mark a cycle of change along a course of a whole day, a month, and the different periods of life. Perception undergoes constant change, and this variance is present throughout life.

  At the “infancy season,” the perception skills are calibrated as a result of tuning in to and focusing on stimulation to which exposure is frequent. For example, with respect to hearing, the core of the hearing organ—the spiral-like part of the inner ear called the cochlea—monitors in a differential pattern low sounds at its basis and high sounds in its sharpening top end.

  A normally functioning human ear is capable of distinguishing sounds at a range of thirty to twelve thousand vibrations per second—from the whisper of a lover in the ear of her companion to the noise made by jet engines on our way (with the lover?) to a tropical island.

  Along the time axis of twenty-four hours, the emphasis of perception changes. When it gets dark, the visual input is reduced and the perception skills based on other senses, mostly the audio sense, become sharper. Along the monthly time axis, it has been found that sensitivity to smells changes in circular patterns among women at the time of the monthly period.

  Babies’ ears are attentive to the whole spectrum of rhythms during the first year of life. Afterward, their hearing becomes tuned to the rhythms they were exposed to, and their sensitivity to other rhythms fades away. Thus, we can claim that there is a developmental window for rhythms that is open during the first year of life. A “rhythmic preference” is imprinted during this window of time, and it accompanies us throughout life. In this sense as well, the brain is the creature of the culture to which its owner was born into.

  At the other end of the course of life, when we are old, there is a rise in the threshold of stimulation that manages to pass through sensory sampling slots, and the range of stimulation which is experienced becomes narrower.

  The Brain Hegemony Over the Senses

  The light of reality penetrates our brain through the prism of the perceptual system, which naturally unstitches the light and changes its manifestations, as prisms do. Reliable monitoring of reality derives, inter alia, from the ability to distinguish between sensory stimulations originating in the external world of phenomena and contents originating in our inner world. In a sense, this is the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Our perception is formed in between.

  The interpretive framework of the brain enforces premises on the reality perceived by the senses. Often, we enforce beliefs and stigmas on the perceived world image. In fact, this is a priori coercion, which precedes the perceived experience.

  The term “mimesis,” which derives from the Greek word meaning representation or imitation, refers, as a metaphor, to the representation of reality. Our brain actually attempts to produce its own version of mimesis.

  Any perceived piece of information is interpreted according to our perception insights.

  The philosopher and Noble prize laureate Henri Bergson once said, “The eye sees only what the brain is prepared to understand.” He indicated the two phases that are essential for the process of vision.

  The framework of perception also challenges the assumption that seeing something with our own eyes is the best proof. During an experiment, strangers who wandered around a university campus started to talk with people who happened to walk near them. During the conversation, two people carrying a door blocked their line of vision between them so they could not see each other. The interruption lasted for one second, during which one of the carriers replaced the stranger who initiated the conversation. When the door carriers moved on, the subjects of the experiment were faced by a different person, who continued the conversation from the point at which it was interrupted. Only seven out of the fifteen subjects reported the disappearance of the first person they conversed with and his replacement by another person. It seems that among the other subjects, “mental inertia” concealed the change from their consciousness.

  Objective, impartial knowledge is actually wishful thinking. We all have an interpretive framework in light of which we interpret the input from the external world.

  The version of reality produced by our brain is biased by nature. In a sense, our brain is an information manipulator that directs the “show of reality,” which is partially correlated with the reality as-is. This correlation is mainly intended to enable our survival.

  Our interpretation of the world partially derives from the inherent interpretive framework in our brain, which makes us more prone to choose and prefer certain interpretations. Subjectivity is built into all of our brain’s interpretations of reality’s occurrences.

  Perception is a hermeneutic skill (hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation, mostly of written texts, but it also refers metaphorically to other disciplines).

  Our interpretation of reality derives, to a great extent, from conditionings of our consciousness, which are sometimes Pavlovian conditionings.

  Perceive Reality as is—the “Polonius Test” and “Bee-Like” Vision

  The Roman author Polonius claimed that the ultimate test for a painter is his ability to draw a flower so vividly that bees will mistake it for a real flower. In other words, to conceptualize reality exactly as it is.

  In this context, there is a story about King Solomon, who was assisted by a little bee when he tried to solve the riddle of the Queen of Sheba and distinguish between a real flower and an artificial one.

  Some might claim that creating a photograph-like drawing is considered low imaginative art, which does not produce anything new, and that art should aspire to create “new worlds” that do not exist in our world. This approach sees the work of art as an expression of a unique interpretation of reality that is the unique brainchild of the artist. Any brain perception of reality, however, derives from interpretation of the brain, according to different “levels of interpretive freedom,” as an expression of different levels of proximity to reality as it is. The bee, by the way, sees colors of flowers within the ultraviolet range. A yellow buttercup is perceived by the bee as purple; thus, the bee also has a unique, “bee-like” interpretation for the colors of flowers.

  Perception as an Adjustable Procrustean Bed

  The perception-organizing system is built-in in us like a procrustean bed with definite boundaries. It is possible, however, to tune and adjust this bed, and we can take advantage of this flexibility in order to better our ability to perceive and process raw information coming from the senses.

  Our basic worldview, which is subjective by nature, often distorts the perception of external inputs. An applicable insight related to this is circumstances that require strict adherence to the outline of external reality; it is recommended to censor non-objective influences in an attempt to draw near to the line of reality up to an asymptotic proximity.

  The Resolution Dial

  We need to deal with different phenomena in our world according to different levels of conceptual resolution. Thus, for example, a telescope is suitable for watching the stars
but not for reading the newspaper. Judging an input regardless of the resolution is similar to an attempt to navigate with a map with no scale.

  There is a built-in resolution dial in our brain. We are used to viewing many things in “daily-life resolution,” which might be referred to as the direct “natural level” or the mesoscopic level. For this level, we do not need to use “perception-expanding” devices such as a microscope or a telescope.

  The measurement horizon of the human consciousness ruler is mostly limited to routine life resolution. Our brain is tuned for dealing with time and space occurrences of daily activities. It is more difficult for us to deal with time and space dimensions that do not fit the resolution level of the routine dealing of our brain with reality occurrences.

  We tend to categorize the world according to distinct perception categories that restrict the boundaries of our thought. We are entities that exist at the mesoscopic level, which is in between the macroscopic world and the microscopic one. We are used to defining concepts within the boundaries of the existence plane, which is essential for our survival, and it is hard for us to stretch our conceptual boundaries beyond the borders of the mesoscopic space and the time resolution of human life.

  The subjective decision regarding the target value toward which to turn the resolution dial determines the quality of information we are about to receive and, as a result, very likely our behavior with respect to this information.

  Each level of resolution, by its nature, leads to an inherent loss of certain information regarding the entity we focus on. The resolution is applied in a task-compatible pattern. Different tasks require different levels of resolution. In a mostly “automatic” pattern, we tune our senses to selected levels of resolution in order to dig up the information that seems important at the specific time. The information-digging-up strategy is dynamic.

  Our commonsense promotes practicable insights of daily-life resolution to a level of axioms. These axioms are valid at the mesoscopic-resolution level, but their validity grows weak at other levels of resolution. For instance, let us consider the firmness quality of a stone. At a microscopic resolution, we can see that the stone we kick contains, like most solid objects in our world, mostly a vacant space. But this resolution is not suitable for everyday life in which, when we kick a stone, our toes bump into clear, solid firmness.

  The intuitions that serve us faithfully in our daily-life routine lose their validity when we wander, in our mind, up and down the scale of resolution toward the subatomic world or, alternately, the wilderness of galaxies.

  The Multi-Resolution Present

  The ability to hold in our consciousness representations of several levels of resolution simultaneously results in an elaborate, reliable, and clear representation of reality.

  Fractal patterns enable us to infer from a certain level of resolution to the level that is one step higher or one step lower from it. The recurrent self-similarity feature, which is embodied in the fractals, enables us to infer the complete visual image from each of its parts.

  When More is Less…

  The border of “no information” appears when we maneuver between different levels of resolution. In the material sense, at each level of resolution we use to assess information, pieces of information drop from our jurisdiction and become invisible to our eyes. For example, when we look at planet Earth from space, we cannot notice the outline of small volcanic islands spread out in the Pacific Ocean, but if we go down and reach the tops of the coconut palm trees growing on these islands, we will no longer have an ability to see the outline of the various continents. For each piece of information there is a typical “no information border.” When we cross this border of limitations, it vanishes from our sensory screen but not, necessarily, from our perceptual screen.

  The mesoscopic level, which represents a medium level of resolution—the level we most use for processing daily-life world occurrences, with no mediation of “sensory input intensifiers”—is supposed to “contain in its memory” the information from the two levels in between it.

  Culture and science—which is an important component of the culture, enable us to expand our perception in the sense of creating a hierarchy of patterns related to the nature of the world. The ability to create patterns that are more and more comprehensive sometimes derives from focusing on increasing levels of resolution, which allows us to see the small details that were invisible before. Sometimes we go up to the resolution levels of the micro and nano world in order to conceptualize the world better than we are able to at the meso and macro levels.

  Our less comprehensive perceptions become a subgroup within our more comprehensive ones. This is what happened to Newton’s mechanics that became a private case in Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

  It makes sense to predict that the brain of the future human being will contain patterns with more expanded drainage basins. Many insights will become more comprehensive.

  The Tango of Senses and Perception

  Any conceptualization that is created in our brain is the combined result (gestalt) of the senses’ impressions from the outside and organizing principles in the perceptual mechanism. Our response to an event is in the texture felt by the fingers of the one who touches, in the ears of the one who listens, and in the eyes of the one who looks—and in the brain’s processing of these inputs. In other words, the response is in the senses’ input and in the input’s perceptual processing.

  Conceptual understanding (intellectual vision) is essential in order to come up with a reality-compatible interpretation of sensory input.

  The brain does not always see what the eyes see, and vice versa.

  There is no complete overlap between the sensory field of vision and the perceptual field of vision. The sights reflected from our retina are not necessarily the ones reflected in our mind’s eye. Looking at a certain object is completely different from seeing it.

  We all suffer from blindness of thought of a certain type, in light of phenomena seen by our eyes, in the sensory sense. We are different from one another with respect to the location of our perceptual blind spot and its diameter, which means in the fields of our ignorance, in the sense of “interpretation failure,” to the data of raw sensory input.

  Scientific evidence shows that information flows between the brain and the sensory organs in a bidirectional pattern. The sensory organs feed the brain with information, but the brain also has the ability to feed the sensory organs with information, and this path is probably essential with respect to the production of various sensory hallucinations. When the brain is constantly fed with information, the flow of information in the opposite lane becomes moderated and restrained. When there is lack of feeding on the part of the senses, however, the brain feeds the sensory organs with raw materials, which might turn into sensory hallucinations.

  Feedback relations between the sensory organs and the brain take place in an upward-downward pattern and in a downward-upward pattern. This is the type of relationship shared by the brain and the ear. The cochlea, the organ in our inner ear that is in charge of transforming air vibrations into bioelectric impulses, infuses audio input, and, at the other end, the brain calibrates and modulates the cochlea according to its momentary preferences.

  Representation maps of visual, audio, and other types of input are organized like topographic maps so that they truthfully represent the gradient of sensory impressions.

  With respect to the areas of sensory input, they are more similar to a “retinotopic map” (retino, as in retina), which maps the input by creating linkage between specific input areas in the retina and specific processing areas in the brain, which are in charge of the input of visual impressions from those specific areas in the retina. Similarly, the areas of initial audio input are organized in a pattern of a “tonotopic map” (tono, as in tone), in which there is linkage between specific areas of initial audio input in the brain and specific tones.

  Pictures “speak” louder than words. T
he number of brain cells that process information originating in the sense of sight is larger than the number of cells that process information originating in other senses.

  Memory researchers use terms such as “very-short-term memory” to describe what is done by external perception stimulations at the time of their occurrence in basic consciousness.

  As for the input of the sense of sight, pictures in modern films, which appear at a frequency of twenty-five hertz, are perceived as a continuous visual input. On the other hand, old movies, whose pictures appear at a frequency that is lower than fifteen hertz, are perceived as fragmented—as a sequence of isolated pictures. We might conclude that the freshening time of the “perceptual screen” with regard to cinematic visual icons is one-twentieth of a second, between one-fifteenth and one-twenty-fifth of a second. Lighting conditions and the level of contrast between the observed object and its surroundings influence the life expectancy of the visual icon. For example, the reflection of lightning in a dark night will exist for a longer period of time compared to a visual manifestation of more moderated contrast.

  With respect to our hearing sense, it seems that most of the times a sound echoes in our audio memory for a longer period of time—between one second to three seconds—before its impression vanishes (this type of memory is called “echoic memory”).