Different perceptions

[chuck kottke]

It all depends on which Wavelength Our minds are on!! :cool:

[LoryABjerre]

 

 

Btw when I meant that I found annoying people complaining about grammar it was mainly about little mistakes, Lory take this as an advice: take English classes.

 

sorry no more english classes not study xenophobia, no respect by people, because people are liars and made indimidate , just because a crime .

[Prince Myshkin]

No I know it was from that New Scientist thing, and I can't really buy an issue but I'd like to know what it says, the study of the human mind is just based on so many hypothesis and like I've said, I don't actually think they can prove consistently that 100% of the things we think about are delusional.

 

I'll give you a brief summary then...

 

There are five sections, and each will take quite a while to condense so I'll do them one at once. Some are more interesting than others. Should take me the whole day to get them down I'm afraid.

 

 

Visual

 

 

Every five seconds you blink, and unless you think about it you don't notice the blackouts because your brain edits them out. Even when your eyes are open they're only taking in a fraction of the visual information that is available. In the centre of your retina is a dense patch of photoreceptor cells about one millimetre across called the fovea. It's the visual systems sweet spot and it's where perception of detail and colour are at its best. When you move away from this section of the eye, visual activity falls away really quickly and colour vision disappears. Ten degrees to the side of the forvea, visual activity is at 20% of the maximum. This means you can only capture a tiny percentage of the visual field in full colour and detail at any one time.

 

Yet vision does not feel like this: it feels like a movie. This is because your eyes are constantly flitting over the visual scene, fixing on one spot for a fraction of a second and then moving on. These jerky eye movements are known as saccades and they happen about three times a second and last up to 200 milliseconds. With each fixation your visual system grabs a bite of high resolution detail which it somehow weaves together to create an illusion of completeness, which is crazy because during saccades you are effectively blind as your brain stops processing what your eyes take in for around 100 milliseconds. For example if you look into a mirror and focus on one eye, then the next, you won't see your eyes move. Not because it is too fast (as you can see other peoples eyes dart) but because your brain isn't taking in that information. Given that you perform 150,000 saccades, that means your visual system is offline for 4 hours of your waking day, without even taking blinking into account. We don't notice anything amiss though.

 

The way your brain weaves such fragmentary information into the smooth technicolour movie that we experience as reality remains a mystery. One leading idea is that it makes a prediction and then uses the foveal "spotlight" to verify it. We create something internally and then we check, check, check. Essentially we experience the brains best guess about what is happening now. This means the visual system has to predict the future. Information striking the fovea cannot be relayed instantaneously to conscious perception: first it has to travel down the optic nerve and then be processed by the brain. This takes several hundred milliseconds, by which time the world has moved on. And so the brain makes a prediction about what the world will look like in 200 milliseconds time and that is what you see. Without this future projection you would be unable to catch a ball, dodge moving objects or walk around without crashing into things.

 

There's another huge hole in the visual system which can make you oblivious to things which should be unmissable. The jerky movements that shift your fovea around the visual scene don't happen at random - they are directed by your brains attentional system. Sometimes you consciously decide on what to focus on, such as when you read. At other times your attention is grabbed by a movement in your peripheral vision or an unexpected noise. Attention is a limited resource, and for reasons unknown most people are unable to keep track of four or five moving objects at once, which can therefore lead to your visual system becoming oblivious to things that are staring you in the face. A famous demonstration of this 'inattention blindness' is the invisible gorilla, a video based experiment in which viewers are asked to pay close attention to a specific aspect of a basketball game. Around half of the viewers completely fail to spot a person in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the screen, beat their chest and walk off again.

[Prince Myshkin]

Bias

 

Whatever your opinion on Barrack Obama, it isn't hard to find somebody who disagrees. A recent poll in the US found that he is the most divisive president since the 1950's: 81% of Democrats think he's doing a good job but only 13% of opposing Republicans agree. How can so many people make a judgement about the same person and come to such different conclusions? The obvious explanation is that they are biased - by their political affiliations, by the media, by their friends and family and much else. The obvious explanation is correct. But who, precisely is biased? It depends who you ask. Those who approve of Obama think the conservatives, and their media, are the biased ones. Those who don't think it's the liberals. In fact, they are both right.

 

As any psychologist will tell you, pretty much everything you think and do is coloured by biases that you are typically totally unaware of. Rather than seeing the world as it is, you see it through a veil of prejudice and self serving hypocrisies. To get a handle on this, think about your opinion on Obama (could be difficult for non-Americans but this is the example it gives). You probably believe your view to be an honest and objective assessment based on a range of evidence from both sides. Perhaps you'll grudgingly acknowledge that you feel the way you do because you are liberal/conservative, but then reassure yourself that being liberal/conservative is the only rational choice, so that's OK. You have just experienced the illusion of naive realism - the conviction that you, and perhaps you alone, perceive the world as it really is, and that anybody who views it differently is biased. This conviction is inescapable and deep.

 

If at this point you are thinking 'Yeah, right, that may be true of other people, but not me', then you have fallen foul of yet another aspect of the illusion: the bias blind spot. Most people will happily acknowledge that such biases exist, but only in other people. Our biases are formed and solidified in our childhood and early adulthood, operating below the radar in our subconscious. It is not that people do not look inwards to question their own judgements and beliefs. Many do. But their biases are not consciously available for inspection, so they leap to the conclusion that their beliefs are correct and based on rational reasoning.

 

Many of the biases are a harmless variant of the positive illusions we routinely entertain in order to shelter our fragile egos from reality, such as a tendency to take credit for successes but deny responsibility for failure. Others are more serious. Few people believe that they are sexist/racist, and that their views are honestly held, but there is always a bias within you and you judge people on their potential based on a long list of things, including their sex and race.

 

While opinions are obviously ripe for bias, facts are also at its mercy, with people adept at interpreting the world to fit with their existing beliefs. For example, environmentalists interpret the fact that most scientists and governments are convinced that humans are ever changing the climate as open-and-shut evidence, but sceptics just see a conspiracy. No amount of new evidence will change their minds and yet, on the whole, both believe their views are unbiased and rational.

 

Similarly we seek out information that fits with our beliefs and ignore or dismiss information that doesn't. This 'confirmation bias' has been shown time and time again, for example in experiments in which people are asked to read a range of evidence about a contentious topic such as capital punishment. Even when exposed to arguments on both sides, most people interpret the evidence in a self-serving way, accepting the data which supports their view and dismissing or ignoring the rest. The scary thing is that they are unaware of dong it. Similarly, confronting people with new information that contradicts their beliefs more often than not ends up hardening their position.

 

Sadly, even though knowing you are biased doesn't necessarily help. In any given instance you are not likely to be aware of it.

[Prince Myshkin]

Half Truths

 

(Article begins with a memory of the writer, who talks about being picked up by his Mother in the garden on a sunny day to look at a silver Concorde in the sky. Concordes were white, not silver.)

 

The collection of snapshots known as your 'autobiographical memory' is not a true and accurate record of your past - it is more like a jumble of old diary entries, photographs and newspaper clippings. Your memory is often based on photographs or stories fro your parents or siblings rather than what you can actually recall. In other words, one of your most important components of your self identity is little more than an illusion.

 

If that sounds implausible consider that over the past three decades psychologists have demonstrated beyond any doubt that the memory is staggeringly fallible and suggestible. Most of the evidence comes from false memory research, where psychologists plant fake memories into peoples heads. In one famous experiment Kimberley Wade and colleagues used doctored photographs and fake parental testimony to convince people they had taken a fictitious hot air balloon ride as a child. Other examples have had people believe that they have met Bugs Bunny (a Warner Bros character) at Disneyland.

 

The success rate of such flagrant manipulation is only about 30% but everybody's memory is susceptible to some extent due to an automatic consequence of how our brain processes information. You cannot remember everything so your mind summarises and remembers the gist of the experiences. You form associations and draw inferences. That gives memory great power, but at a cost.

 

It's one thing to implant memories in a controlled lab setting, but how often does it happen in real life? We do not have a firm grasp on that and it's hard to really know without some measure of what actually happened or some corroborating evidence. Even so, the fact that memory can be so easily tricked in the laboratory suggests it must be in daily life too.

 

(Article looks at 'flashbulb memory' - memories of extremely vivid events such as 9/11 and the death of Princess Diana- and concentrates on a 9/11 study in which people are asked a few days after the incident where they were and what they were doing when it happened and how they found out about the news. They were then asked a year later and more than half of the participants had changed their story on at least one count, while still express extreme confidence in their testimony)

 

Flashbulb memory is also highly suggestible and in a 2002 study, when people were asked about the death of Diana, including whether they had seen footage of the crash, nearly half said they had, despite the fact that such footage does not exist. An even higher number confidently 'remembered' seeing non-existent footage of a Boeing 747 crash in the Netherlands in 1992.

 

If such vivid and and confidently held memories can be so riddled with inaccuracy and open to revision, it is probably true that all autobiographical memories are suspect. Again there is evidence that this is the case. When researchers in new Zealand asked twins about their shared childhood, they discovered that most pairs have at least one disputed memory - an event they are both convinced happened to them and not to their twin. Spousal arguments which revolve around disputed accounts of the same even is ripe for exploration. At the University of Hull, UK, it was found that 20% of people have autobiographical memory which they do not believe to be true, often because they contradict established fact.

 

Does it matter that our autobiographical memories are flawed? In some ways it's terrifying to think just how spectacularly wrong they may be. Memories are part of your narrative, part of your self identity. There are legal ramifications too. If you witnessed a crime and were asked to give testimony about it in court, how confident would you be of giving an accurate report?

 

In many other aspects though, it matters not. The illusionary quality of memory is now seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Memory is no longer conceived as being exclusively about the past, but as part of a generalised 'mental time travel' module that allows us to construct and test future scenarios based on past experience. If memory were inflexible that would not be possible.

[Prince Myshkin]

Egotism

 

Hows your driving? If you are anything like the average person you probably think it's pretty good. One study found that 74% of drivers believed themselves to be better than average behind the wheel. And, perversely, those who had been in a crash were slightly more confident about their abilities than those who had not been.

 

This, of course, does not reflect reality, unless there are a handful of truly dreadful drivers, not everybody can be better than average. And yet if you ask people to rate themselves on almost any positive trait, most put themselves in the above average category. Asked on negative traits and they are more likely to put themselves in the less than average category.

 

This egotistic illusion has been imaginatively dubbed the 'better-than-average-effect'. It is incredibly pervasive, yet goes largely unnoticed. In an ironic twist, most people believe themselves to be more resistant than average to having an inflated opinion of themselves.

 

We also inflate our opinions of loved ones. Around 95% of people rate their partner as smarter, more attractive, warmer and funnier than average. Ad as anyone who has endured a 30-something dinner party will testify, parents almost universally rate their children as cleverer, cuter and more developmentally advanced than their peers.

 

Optimism bias is a well established effect characterised by unrealistic expectations about the future. Most people expect to live longer, healthier and more successful lives than average, whilst underestimating their chances of getting divorced, falling ill or having an accident. And the more (or less) desirable the outcome, the stronger people believe it will (or won't) happen to them.

 

Parents create positive illusions in childhood by fawning over their children. Throughout life we have an innate tendency to divide the world into 'us' and 'them'. As soon as you forge a connection with someone, you become part of their 'in group', and humans are hard wired to see people within this group more positively than they see others. In this way, we all sign up to various mutual appreciation societies that exaggerate our virtues, ignore our faults and look down on others. This is why most people feel excessively positive about themselves.

 

Far from being pathological though, positive illusions are now viewed as being a marker of a healthy mind. People who don't harbour them are more likely to be clinically depressed - a state called depressive realism.

 

However deluded you are about yourself, the chances are that this is nothing compared to how you think others perceive you. Everybody worries and wonders about how they come across to others, and most of us think we have a pretty good handle on it. We don't. That is not to say you are completely useless, however we are surprisingly poor at determining how we are coming across to others. This is largely down to something called the 'spotlight' effect' - the deluded belief that everything you do and say is being closely observed and scrutinised. Because we are so aware of ourselves, it can be easy to think that others are noticing us when they are not. As a result we blow everything out of proportion. Say you spill water on yourself so it looks like you peed yourself. You assume everyone is going to notice, but they don't, because the world doesn't really revolve around you. People also assume that their emotional states are broadcast obviously, whereas generally they are invisible.

 

It also works the other way. If you do or say something you think is especially clever or admirable, you are likely to overestimate the extent to which other people will notice. most of the time they won't even register as they are busy tending to their own egos. The central problem is that you know yourself too well. You notice all sorts of subtleties that others simply don't. They see general characteristics. This is compounded by the fact that we have difficulty guessing other peoples thoughts.

 

Surprisingly our lack of insight doesn't disappear when we are around people we know well: accuracy does go up but only slightly. There is even evidence that your ability to read the mind of your spouse actually drops after one year of marriage. People can be better at reading how well they are communicating with a stranger. You believe you know your partner very well as you spend more time together, but this can simply lead to more of an illusion of insight rather than actual insight.

 

Perhaps the area we have the least amount of insight is physical appearance. Everybody knows what they look like, but when it comes to judging how we look, we are hopeless. If you ask people to find a photograph of themselves within a sea of other faces they find it faster when the image has been morphed to look more attractive, suggesting we think that we are more attractive than we actually are.

[Prince Myshkin]

Free Will

 

(This one is shorter as it leads on from a piece in a New Scientist from last month that I do not have access to)

 

The notion that we have free will is deeply embedded in human experience. But the more we learn about the physical universe and the human brain, the less plausible it becomes.

 

One argument goes as follows: the universe, including bits of it that make up your brain, is entirely deterministic. The state it is in right now determines the state it will be a millisecond, a month or a million years from now. Therefore free-will cannot exist.

 

Neuroscience has also chipped in. Around 30 years ago psychologist Benjamin Libet discovered that if you ask people to make voluntary movements, their brains initiate the movement before they become consciously aware of any intention to move. Other experiments have since been performed along similar lines, leading many neuroscientists to conclude that free-will is an illusion.

 

But it feels so real. We all have a sense of agency - the conviction that even though we did oe thing, we could have done another, and that at any given moment we have free choice of any number of actions. Yet it seems that this is an elaborate illusion created by your brain.

[the_gloaming09]

It took a while to read all of those but they were fascinating!

 

I particularly found that eye one really interesting how from our quick eye movements we essentially are loosing like 4 hours of vision a day... which is crazy!

 

It is though slightly scary about false memories. One of my friends has told me about them and it's really uneasy to know that your mind can be filled with things that never happened. It also is terrible in that as mentioned when it comes to capturing someone for some criminal case it's very likely you have the wrong person from a wrong testimony or lineup.

 

Also that egotism thing was interesting as well just because I definitely agree people spend too much time worrying about others perceptions.

[Prince Myshkin]

It took a while to read all of those but they were fascinating!

 

I particularly found that eye one really interesting how from our quick eye movements we essentially are loosing like 4 hours of vision a day... which is crazy!

 

It is though slightly scary about false memories. One of my friends has told me about them and it's really uneasy to know that your mind can be filled with things that never happened. It also is terrible in that as mentioned when it comes to capturing someone for some criminal case it's very likely you have the wrong person from a wrong testimony or lineup.

 

Also that egotism thing was interesting as well just because I definitely agree people spend too much time worrying about others perceptions.

 

I wouldn't say it was very likely, otherwise the whole criminal system would be somewhat pointless, but it's certainly possible.

[the_gloaming09]

I wouldn't say it was very likely, otherwise the whole criminal system would be somewhat pointless, but it's certainly possible.

 

Yeah I guess very likely isn't a good choice of words, but I think it's definitely something that should be considered when picking out suspects and how it could be flawed. I know my friend (who studies and majored in psychology) read some articles about false memories and how they can have a pull in falsely accusing people. There was this one article he told me about where this woman who was raped was so convinced during the lineup choice that she picked the person who raped her, that he was convicted and sent to jail. It turns out that like 20 years later through DNA testing the man was proven to be innocent.

[Prince Myshkin]

Bump for a thread I am proud of since it came up in conversation for me tonight.

[NumbersGirl]

hello mr. greg and thank you for the bump... now you've made me curious about this "conversation"

[RedBalloon]

Good Posts~ Might come back later for some real examples to verify the aspects.

[the_gloaming09]

:lol:

 

 

it's great how greg just comes back to make a post once like every few months haha!

[Prince Myshkin]

I've never reached 10,000 posts before so I'm slowly moving towards it.

 

As for the conversation, my girlfriend and I were talking about chance (after watching Match Point by Woody Allen in which chance plays a huge part, the conclusion hanging upon it) and then a few things like Fatalism, Determinism and Predeterminism. This then moved on to a conversation about free-will which led to me remembering the article I had posted about in this thread. I came here to find what it had said since you can't reach it from the New Scientist website.

[Reilly]

Welcome back Gregcock.

 

I would contribute but my philosophical theories are reserved for true intellectuals.

 

*Goes to wiki Fatalism*

[Cobalt]

this thread hurts my brain

[viva-la-coldplay]

I definitely see where you are coming from, however, I suppose for me I see this issue in terms of one's entire experience of life.

 

For example, it's like when you have these huge, mind-boggling ideas and thoughts in your head, but when it comes to telling someone else those ideas, or even writing them down, the other person may have a vague idea of what you're talking about but they don't see it in exactly the same way as you do, they might perceive the issue entirely differently or, as has happened to me a number of times, they might just not have a clue!

 

I've often said that this will be one of the things that will always annoy me about life: the fact that I can only see the world through my eyes. No matter how much anyone else tells me about what they're thinking, we can only gain a limited insight into how other people view the world and it does, I'll admit, frustrate me sometimes. I would just love to immerse myself entirely in someone else's brain even for a day and just see if they see the world in similar or wholly different ways to myself: if they notice that particular shade of green, if they hear that melody in the song, if they react the same way upon being presented with a situation.

 

Unfortunately though, I have started to accept that this will never be the case, and I did actually find two quotes the other day (completely unrelated to this particular post) which I feel sum up my opinion

"There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words."

- Dostoevsky

"No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the

confines of your head."

- Terry Josephson

 

I feel that although we're all living on this one planet, we might as well be living on 7 billion different ones: we are all going to have different experiences of our time on earth, but I suppose the best thing to do is just to enjoy what time we have and appreciate that while others may have different viewpoints to ours, to have respect for those who differ and to appreciate those who are similar is the most crucial thing.

 

Well done, by the way, for creating this very deep thread :D

 

NB: This post probably hasn't even summed up half of what I feel precisely about the matter, so there you go, hypothesis proved!

[Prince Myshkin]

Thanks for the contribution :)

An interesting read

[Nikola]

Different perceptions... :D Hmmm... Let's say I've experienced what it feels like to talk to people on different wavelengths...

[Crests]

Different perceptions... :D Hmmm... Let's say I've experienced what it feels like to talk to people on different wavelengths...

 

dude i thought you said you were gonna stop

[Nikola]

dude i thought you said you were gonna stop

 

Wat? That was a very appropriate post for this thread.

Never in my life have I ever been so misinterpreted by anyone like by yous guys.

 

 

The one who shall not be named skews every word I say, constantly calling me offensive, yet he is blind to the fact that I'm making the same jokes like that "offensive" thing in his signature. (Which I find funny.)

 

:cry:

 

But you are right. This is boring.

[Reilly]

You're just unbelievable, I've tried explaining why you're so irritating as well as offensive but you just don't listen. I'm clearly not the only one who finds what you say intolerable, so stop playing the victim card.