Your Creative Brain and the World of Illusion

Imagine that you are sitting reading a book in some public place. Nearby, somebody switches off a neon light that had been buzzing angrily away. The sudden silence brings you an immense sense of relief as you realise that you had be hearing that sound all along but that it popped into your attention, only after the noise itself had stopped. In terms of perception, this is a little weird isn't it?

Giant of Psychology, William James spoke of this many years ago, and observed that it feels like you had been listening all the time. But can that be true? Here is an even more vexing example: Imagine, now, that you are at a party and are engaged in hearty conversation with some semi-tipsy reveller. On the other side of the room, somebody says "Look at that moron. Standing there like they own the place. Jerk... Bloody (your name) I wish they hadn't come" Now, obviously your ears are going to perk up when you hear your name. The odd thing, though, is that you hadn't been listening to this person at all... not consciously anyway. But as soon as you hear you name, you can somehow rewind reality in your mind and remember the first part of the sentence... from when supposedly you weren't listening. So were we listening or weren't we?

I suspect our working memory has a hand in this. Working memory is not a storage system so much as pallet of immediate and recent experience based on sense data... OK bear with me a minute... Our brain takes this pallet of sense data and projects meaning upon it according to how it perceives our needs. Working memory thus creates continuity, even though it is a kind of "backwards rationalization" in a way. There have been some very interesting investigations into this, as well. The most notable one would be the famous "cutaneous rabbit illusion" in which a subject is tapped on the arm with a pencil. They were tapped five times on the wrist, and then three times on the elbow, and then twice on the shoulder. The sensation reported by the subjects was enlightening: the feeling of a little animal scurrying up their arm. They actually felt tiny feet on their arms but not only when they had been touched. They also felt the feet where they had not been touched at all. They felt tiny footsteps between wrist and elbow and between elbow and shoulder.

This is an example of a perception (the sensation of a mouse running up your arm) being created from essentially meaningless data (a pencil tapping your arm). The perception is therefore an invention.

In this case, why this particular illusion? Why not turn the tapping into a trickly of liquid going up your arm? Well, it could be a life-preserving instinct to leap to conclusions about possible dangers. The brain fills in the gaps and creates the illusion of the mouse just in case. Better safe than sorry, right? I'm pretty sure that if I ever feel a sensation of an animal scurrying up my arm, I'm not just going to sit there in peace and harmony. No. In my case, I would leap up with a high pitched shriek and frantically flap my arms around until I was sure there were no rodents on me. Those with the genetic tendency to go into such a panic, would probably have an advantage over the types who would just sit there smiling as a black-widow spider advances on their jugular.

The idea that we humans construct reality around us is not new at all. This is not Solipsism either. There is, of course a real world but it is your relationship with that world that is your creation. So beliefs are "fixed" and so is identity, core values and fears and myriad other cognitive constructions all make our brains leap to conclusions to allow you to keep living and get what you want. These are the shortcuts your brain uses to keep you alive. It is the allocation of scarce brain resources to where it is needed most. Sure, we can be fooled like in those clever experiments, but looked at from the point of view of natural selection, it is a magnificent survival tool.?

Brendan. C. Clarke - CogniFit Video & Mindfulness coach