Predictions of our brain. Why do we perceive reality differently?

Why do we, having the same senses of perception of the world around us, perceive it differently?

Modern science traditionally speaks of five types of perception of the surrounding world: vision; hearing; touch (tactile); taste; sense of smell. It is also noted that each person has a leading analyzer of the perception of the world, which can be one of the above-mentioned organs of perception involved in the construction of a perceptual image (modality of perception).

What is the feeling

Sensation (sensory experience) is a mental process, which is a mental reflection of individual properties and states of the external environment that affect our senses. Simply put, it is the body's detection of external or internal stimulation. For example, the eyes detect light waves, the ears detect sound waves.

The sensation process consists of three successive stages:

1. Sensory receptors detect stimuli (stimuli).
2. Sensory stimuli are converted into electrical impulses (action potentials) that must be decoded by the brain.
3. Electrical impulses travel along neurons to specific parts of the brain, where the impulses are deciphered into information (perception comes into play).

For example, when soft tissue is touched, mechanoreceptors (sensory receptors on the skin) note that your skin has been touched. This sensory information is then converted into neural information through a process called transduction. Next, the neural information travels along nerve pathways to the corresponding part of the brain, where sensations are perceived as touching tissue.

There are two points worth mentioning here. First: despite the fact that our body experiences sensations 24 hours a day, we feel only one thing at a particular moment (with the help of attention). After some time, we can remember other sensations, recalling the experience corresponding to them. Second: we are not superheroes, so our sensory experience cannot detect radio waves, x-rays or microscopic parasites crawling on our skin. We also cannot catch all the smells around us or taste and understand every spice in a dish. In this regard, dogs and other animals are significantly superior to us.

Many psychologists have asked the question “How to measure the intensity of a sensation?” The answer has not yet been found, but the thresholds have been identified:

1. Absolute threshold: The minimum amount of stimulation that a person can detect 50% of the time. This is the point at which something becomes tangible to our senses. For example, the quietest sound we can hear, or the slightest touch we can feel. Anything below this threshold goes unnoticed.
2. The difference threshold (or simply noticeable difference) is the minimum difference that must occur between two body stimuli to identify them as two separate sensations 50% of the time. Here's an example: you hear the sound of a radio in the next room, and then realize that someone has turned up the volume. The difference threshold is the amount of change required to recognize that a change has occurred. However, the difference itself is not absolute. Imagine that you are holding a suitcase weighing 5 kilograms in your hand. If you add 1 kilogram, you will feel the difference. But if it weighs 50 and you add 1 kilogram to it, you will hardly notice it. Therefore, we need to talk about percentages and not absolute ratios. In the first case the difference is 20%, and in the other 2%.
3. The final threshold is the maximum amount of stimulation a person can feel.

There are several theories that can help us better understand the concept of sensation.

Signal detection theory

You've probably been in a crowded room with many people talking at the same time. Situations like this can make it difficult to focus on a single stimulus, such as a conversation you're having with a friend.

We often face a similar challenge: focusing our attention on certain things while at the same time trying to ignore the flow of information entering our senses. When we try to confront this, we make conscious decisions about what is important to us and what is background noise. This concept is called signal detection theory because we want to focus on one thing and ignore everything else.

Sensory adaptation

Have you ever wondered why we immediately notice certain smells or sounds, and then after a while we seem to stop noticing them, and they fade into the background? As soon as we adapt to the perfume or the ticking of a clock, we cease to recognize them. This process is called sensory adaptation: perhaps the logic of evolution here is that if the stimulus does not change, then why do we need to constantly feel it?

Consequences for evolution

The evolutionary benefits of a functioning TRN can easily be seen in our ancestors. Imagine that you were hunting a mammoth 15 thousand years ago. Think how many moments must have remained in your field of vision! Your fellow tribesmen, their weapons, your surroundings, the reflection of light on the ice, other predators, the position of your body, the grip of your weapon, the strange sounds of birds, the feeling of hunger.

Wikipedia

What's most important?

• How to kill a mammoth.
• And how to stay alive.

This way, your brain will prioritize the sight and sound of the mammoth itself. Where he stands, what he looks like, is he injured, is he approaching or standing still. This information will save your life. If you were distracted by a beautiful piece of ice, most likely there would be nothing left of you.

Your TRN filters out this intangible information as irrelevant. You save your life and win: you now have food that will last for several weeks.

Does it matter if you can't remember the exact facial expressions of your tribemates when they made an attack? Or how bright the sunlight was? Not really. TRN worked as expected.

Why and how to train sensations?

If you train your senses, you will significantly improve your memory. As you may know, the information that is best remembered is that associated with the senses: for example, English words need to be written, made vivid, maybe even “sniffed.” And memory, in turn, is closely related to creative thinking. In short, by consciously sensing, you develop many cognitive skills.

There is one simple but very effective exercise. The essence of it is to devote five minutes to training one of the senses:

• Vision: Pay attention exclusively to what you see. Look at the object, its shape, curves, highlights.
• Smell: Open the refrigerator, take out foods one by one and smell them. It is best to do this, of course, alone. Try to compare smells and analyze them. Let us remind you once again: try to turn off all other senses.
• Hearing: Begin to pick up all the sounds you hear. Compare them, try to switch from one to another.
• Touch: touch different objects - paper, table, blanket. Try to understand the difference in sensations, stay in this moment.
• Taste: Try different foods (little by little). Don't swallow it right away, try to understand all the flavors. Compare varieties of cheese, bread or meat.

You may ask: “Why doesn’t sensory training occur in everyday life?” The thing is that we don't do it consciously. The sensations only occur if you pay attention to them. Everything else seems to fall on deaf ears.

Why haven't we lost our minds yet?

theatlantic.com

Every second, the body sends 11 million bits of information to the brain. How many of these bits are you processing consciously? Maximum 50. Think about it: 50 out of 11,000,000. It turns out that only 0.00001% of the data that we are able to perceive is brought to the conscious part of our mind.

With this exciting knowledge, many people enthusiastically take the leap into pseudoscience . “We only use 10% of our brain!” “The subconscious mind has much more power that can be unlocked!” Unfortunately, it's not that simple. And that's why.

What is perception

Now let’s find out what perception is and try to understand how and how it differs from sensation.

Perception (perception) is sensory knowledge of objects in the surrounding world, which subjectively appears to be direct, immediate. While sensation is used to detect sound waves, perception is used by the brain to interpret the sound of a guitar, for example. The way we perceive our surroundings is what sets us apart from animals and from each other.

To look at the phenomenon of perception, we need to talk about theories that are either directly or indirectly related to it.

Gestalt principle

The German word “gestalt” roughly translates to “whole” or “form,” and Gestalt psychologists believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. According to the theory, in order to interpret what we receive through our senses, we try to organize this information into certain groups. This allows the information to be interpreted in the future without unnecessary repetition.

For example, when you see one dot, you perceive it as such, but when you see five dots together, you group them together, saying “a series of dots.” Without such a tendency, our perception will view the same series as “dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.” In this case, the processing process itself will increase approximately five times in time, and also reduces perceptual ability.

Maintaining Constancy of Perception

Imagine if every time an object changed in perception, we had to completely rework it. For example, as you approached a building, with each step you would have to re-evaluate the size of the building because it would get bigger.

Fortunately, this doesn't happen. Because of our ability to maintain consistency in our perceptions, we roughly estimate the height of a building no matter how far away we are from it. Perceptual constancy refers to our ability to see things differently without reinterpreting the properties of the object. Usually they talk about three constants: size, shape, brightness.

Size constancy refers to our ability to see objects as maintaining the same size, even at a distance. This is true for all our senses. As we move away from the speaker, the song becomes softer. We understand this and perceive the sound to be approximately as loud.

Everyone saw the round plate. However, when we look at it from an angle, it looks more like an ellipse. The constancy of the shape allows us to perceive this plate as round, although the angle from which we look seems to distort the shape.

Brightness constancy refers to our ability to recognize that a color remains the same regardless of how it appears at different levels. That dark blue shirt you wore on the beach suddenly “turns” black when you walk into a dark room. Without color consistency, we will constantly reinterpret color and be amazed at the miraculous transformation that constantly “happens” to our clothes.

Your brain will never work at 100%

To perform certain tasks, you more or less need certain areas of the brain. There is no point in firing every neuron at once when it is not needed - most likely, this will even make it difficult to perform certain actions. In other words, a waste of energy.

Your brain already consumes 20% of your daily calories and needs deep sleep every night to cleanse and reset. This is how it maintains its effectiveness. In addition, the vast majority of gray matter is active most of the time. Of course, the brain is not working at 100%, but it should be very “hot” inside.

Keeping things alive is a lot of work.

Perception training

To train perception, you must first be aware of your feelings and sensations. The best way to do this is to have a list of questions. Write them down on a piece of paper and ask yourself several times a day:

• How adequate is my perception?
• Do I have a lot of subjective and emotional bias in me now?
• Do I have a fear of seeing what is really happening?
• How do I perceive the world in its movements, colors, shapes and smells?
• How much information from the senses can I absorb at once?
• Is my perception complete?
• Does my consciousness look deep or skim the surface?

The answers to these questions, which you will give every day, will significantly change your attitude towards perception, and therefore improve it.

Hearing

Hearing is the second provider of information after vision. Our species dominates the Earth; we have long ceased to fight for survival in the primeval forest, where in the darkness of the night only hearing could warn of danger and save our lives. So why does hearing rank second among the senses?

Crickets and grasshoppers listen with their front legs. Dutch physicists were able to reproduce this organ of hearing, which turned out to be one of the most sensitive acoustic instruments

The answer is simple: because it is the most accessible channel for exchanging information between people. No hearing - no speech, or it is very difficult. Using a special technique, a deaf person can be taught to speak, but the speech will not be very intelligible and is often excessively loud. But speech is the most important component of thinking, helping to organize it, and thinking is again the brain.

We do not hear ultrasound (very high tones) and infrasound (very low tones), although they also affect us. The ears also play the role of an organ of balance. Without them, we would constantly feel dizzy and walk with an unsteady gait.

Difference between sensation and perception

These are very similar concepts, which, however, are very different. So let's find out what exactly it is.

We have five different sensory organs (in the classical sense): eyes, nose, ears, tongue and skin. They are responsible for sensing stimuli around them. The signals we receive from the environment are called sensations . Simply put, sensations are what our senses perceive and transmit to the brain. When the brain receives a stimulus, it transforms it into feelings, taste, sound, sight and smell. In this regard, perception can even be called the sixth sense: it is how we form an opinion about something that happens around us.

Perception is an absolutely personal experience, while sensations are objective. We may be cold (sensation), but we force ourselves to believe that we are warm (perception). Perception is a psychological concept, sensations are physiological.

Two different people can have completely opposite perceptions of the same sensations: the taste of food, the perception of a masterpiece of art, and so on.

In this regard, I would like to take away one lesson: your level of happiness and success in life depend on perception. It doesn’t matter what life circumstances you are in now: learn to perceive them in such a way that they evoke optimism and a desire to learn and develop. Remember that when two people look through a grille, one sees dirt and the other sees stars. We are biological beings and are highly dependent on living conditions, but we have been given incredible power to change our perceptions in such a way as to be satisfied with life and happy in any situation. Or it can deliberately cause a state of dissatisfaction if this motivates us to become better.

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We also recommend reading:

• Storytelling
• Feelings, emotions and sensations: the first step to profiling
• Learning Experience: Gibbs Model
• Mental processes: types and brief description
• Sensations: what they are and what they are like
• Meditation for Beginners
• Two important laws of memory
• Cognitive load theory
• Psychic reflection
• Cognitive processes
• Managing emotions with color

Key words:_D1027, 1Cognitive science, 4Psychoregulation

Artificial organs: fantasy in reality

It's no secret that modern medicine has reached heights in the creation of artificial organs such as an arm or a leg. There are already prototypes of mechanical hands controlled by signals directly from the brain, and exoskeletons that will allow people who have never stood on their feet to walk before. Doctors implant artificial hearts in patients. The development of artificial skin is in full swing, which will not be rejected and will allow people to be treated after the most terrible burns. However, the creation of an artificial ear, and even more so, an artificial eye, still poses difficulties.

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Implications for modern times

In today's world, the work of our TRN is a little more confusing.

First, today we need to process much more information than ever before. And compared to our ancestors, we very rarely encounter serious life situations.

How does our TRN prioritize? Which 50 of these million bits should I keep and which should I throw away? The short answer: no one knows for sure. There are some studies on this topic, but they are new and confusing.

Notably unusual TRN functioning is observed in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Differential functioning of the TRN has also been implicated in ADHD, autism, and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Because neurodiverse people have certain skills and advantages, a significant minority could help the tribes survive. For example, by remembering tracks or hunting with above average memory and energy.

Simply put, it’s good if 11 members of the tribe attack the mammoth. But at least one needs to scream if another animal appears from behind.