3
Anatomy of a Hoax
We are being hoaxed: both our verbal explanations (the illusion of explanatory depth of Chapter 1) and our sensory experience (the grand illusion of Chapter 2) are vapours, masquerading as solid form. There is no mirror of nature, no inner copy of outer reality, no churning unconscious, no unfathomable depths from which our conscious thoughts break through. Beneath the momentary flow of fragmented and astonishingly sketchy experiences and even sketchier recollections from memory, there is precisely nothing. Well, of course, there is a frenzy of brain activity, but there are no further thoughts. The only thoughts, emotions, feelings are those that flow through our stream of consciousness.
How is it, then, that we are deceived so comprehensively? In this chapter we will focus on our senses – but the same sleight of hand underlies the apparent solidity of our explanations in terms of beliefs and desires, hopes and fears. It turns out that, as with so many convincing tricks, the grand illusion depends on misdirection. We point our fovea, and concentrate our attention, on one aspect of the visual world, and notice scarcely anything of what is happening in all the rest. If we are suspicious, even for a moment, that our perceptual representations are rather vague and monochrome in the periphery of our vision, we swivel our eyes across to check, and, sure enough, all is detailed and colourful.
Conjurors have known this for centuries – by directing our gaze and our attention to one location in the image, and then deviously slipping a coin, ball or even rabbit past our unsuspecting visual systems in some faraway location in our visual periphery. Of course, misdirection can fail – notoriously young children can be a menace to the would-be illusionist by failing to pick up the cues that are supposed to channel their attention in one direction, and inconveniently looking in some other direction – perhaps precisely where the ‘magical’ object is surreptitiously being manoeuvred. But there is no such danger for the perpetrator of the grand illusion. There is no possibility whatever of examining a blurry, visual location and revealing that we have no idea what words, faces or objects it contains – because the very act of examination conjures up the relevant word, face or object. The process of focusing our attention on a patch of the visual image (e.g. a face in a crowd, a word in a page of text) is the same process by which colour and detail spring into being. So the brain can fool us that we ‘see’ the stable, rich, colourful world before us in a single visual gulp, whereas the truth is that our visual connection with the world is no more than a series of localized ‘nibbles’.
So the ‘secret’ of the hoax is disarmingly simple: the world around us seems sharp and colourful and full of objects, words and faces because, as soon as we wonder about any aspect of that world, our eyes can almost instantly flick across to the relevant part, fixate it and, apparently in an instant, provide an answer. The very fluency with which answer follows question gives us the impression that all the answers were already stored up, ready for use – that we have a full and precise mental representation of the world around us, to be consulted at any moment. But experiments, with gaze-contingent eye-tracking and many other experimental methods besides, show quite the opposite: that, far from drawing answers about distant parts of the visual scene from a pre-existing store, our eyes race to provide the answer in an instant.
Consider – to switch from vision to touch for a moment – the ‘feel’ of a tennis racket when we have our eyes shut. We get a sense of the weight and manoeuvrability of the racket from waving it to and fro; of the tautness and spacing of the strings by strumming our fingertips across them; of the oval shape of the frame of the racket by running a finger around it. But we obtained the subjective experiences of the feel of the racket one by one – we had no awareness of the strings when we wielded the racket; no sense of the racket’s heft as we strummed the strings. Yet we do not have a sense of the frame springing in and out of existence – or of the strings momentarily forming and disappearing. We have the sense that the racket has an entirely stable and solid existence, even though, of course, we can only experience it one aspect at a time.
What happens, then, when we open our eyes, and examine the racket? In fact, much the same as before: our eyes will visually ‘touch’ different parts of the image of the racket, depending on which question we are asking – concerning its frame, strings, or overall size and weight. But our eyes shift, and report their findings, so rapidly and effortlessly that we can all too easily imagine that these findings were already loaded in our minds.
Our eyes can touch only one visual location at a time, but can dash across the visual field with astonishing rapidity to alight on whatever visual information we need in the moment. I suspect it is important too that while we are very much aware of the movement of our hands in examining some new part of the racket, we are only very vaguely aware of where our eyes are looking – so that it comes, for example, as a complete surprise that our eyes hop around when we are examining a face, continually revisiting the eyes and mouth; or that reading a line of text proceeds by a series of one- or two-word jumps, rather than a smooth glide across the text (see Figure 8). So our eyes dashing across the visual field to pick up one piece of information then another goes almost entirely unnoticed.
The step-by-step nature of perception, whether tactile or visual, goes deeper than our hopping from one ‘touchpoint’ with the outside world to the next. We can interpret the information from a single touchpoint in a variety of different ways, as we saw with the discussion of stabilized images in Chapter 2: the very same retinal image may at one moment be ‘BEER’, at the next ‘BEE’, ‘PEEP’ or ‘PEER’. Our brain can lock onto different aspects of the available sensory information, but crucially it seems that we can lock onto only one interpretation of the information at a time. With normal, non-stabilized images, when we see the word ‘BEER’, we can fancy that we see all the other component words too, simultaneously loaded into our brains, because, after all, as soon as we wonder whether we can see ‘BEE’, or ‘PEEP’ and ‘PEER’ as sub-components of ‘BEER’, we can often provide a ready answer. But this is the same trick in another guise: rather than our eyes dashing to a different visual location, our brains are locking onto different subsets of the visual input at a particular location, but doing this quickly and effortlessly so that we can imagine we are not switching from one interpretation of the image to another, but holding all interpretations simultaneously in mind.
Thus we look at the world through a narrow window of lucidity – a tiny patch of colour and detail in a fuzzy field, but we don’t notice the ‘edges’ of the window, or even its existence. Now imagine, by contrast, putting on a pair of glasses which blur your vision severely at the edges and drain the image of colour, except for a tiny patch in their centre. Look fixedly straight ahead through these glasses, and you will see nothing strange. The whole world will look as detailed and colourful as ever (because your retina, and so your brain, doesn’t ‘miss’ the detail that the glasses have obliterated, because they would be unable to detect it even if it were present). But were we to move our eyes, even a little, the ‘window of lucidity’ allowed by the glasses would immediately become all too apparent.
Consider, for a moment, the possibility that, in some science-fiction future, it might be possible to embed a tiny eye-tracker into a pair of glasses so that the optics of the glasses would block out colour and detail except where our eyes happen to be looking. Observing this strange equipment in action, we would perhaps see a semi-opaque pair of spectacles, with a small translucent patch, which would, perhaps rather disconcertingly, continually jump around as the wearer’s eyes scanned the world. Spectators would wonder how we were able to play tennis through the murk; passengers would be alarmed by the apparent near-enveloping visual fog, while wearers would nonchalantly drive through thick traffic.
Yet from our own point of view, our visual world would be much as normal. The glasses would, by design, present us with a detailed, coloured image of whichever part of the external world we happened to be looking at. The mists would part in a new location on the surface of the glasses as the eyes landed after each saccade (i.e. each jump from one fixation point to the next), and this would happen so smoothly that we would be unaware that the mists had ever been present. We would be able to scan text and report that our mug is blue (and see the detail of the hand-painted flowers on it). Every time we asked ourselves a question about the visual world, we would be able to answer it. So we would never be aware that the glasses let through, almost everywhere, only a formless colourless image – because we would see colourful detail wherever we happened to look.
On reflection, these hypothetical glasses are not entirely in the realm of science fiction; we are, in a very real sense, already wearing them. Imagine for a moment that, rather than sci-fi glasses, we decide to make sci-fi contact lenses, with precisely the same properties. Now, what would these contact lenses have to look like? Well, the handy thing about contact lenses is that they move around as your eye moves around – so we don’t have to worry about clever eye-tracking technology and lens modification. All we need is a filter that blurs, and drains colour information from the periphery, and lets through colour and detail right opposite the fovea. Making a lens like this would be easy, but also pointless, because all it would do would be to block out information that we don’t detect anyway. Totally clear contact lenses would do just as well; in fact, no contact lenses at all would do just as well. We don’t have to build the window of lucidity into our glasses, or contact lenses, precisely because our eye and brain has done this job for us.
So, then, our sense of living in a fully colourful and detailed world is really a sense of having colour and detail available, as it were, for immediate inspection – we can ‘lay our hands on’ any information we wish for, with the mere flick of the eye. I have the sense of being aware of the colours of the spines of the books on the bookshelf in the corner of the room I am in now, but not of the bookshelves of the British Library, because a quick eye movement (and perhaps a turn of the head) can tell me ‘thin yellow book with black bar; blue book with white writing; red oversized hardback …’ but no amount of shifting and squinting will tell me anything about the layout of bookshelves in faraway London.
But back to the sci-fi glasses. Would their hypothetical wearers be deluded in thinking that they are, none the less, able to see a richly detailed and colourful world? In one sense ‘Yes’, but in another ‘No’. Yes, they would have no idea that the glasses have a limited window of lucidity – they would imagine they were looking through completely transparent glass. But no, they would not be wrong in believing that, whatever question of detail or colour crossed their mind, they would be able to answer it, almost instantly. And perhaps this is what awareness of living in a fully coloured and detailed world really is: not that we have answers to all possible questions of colour and detail loaded up in our minds, but that we can answer any question of colour and detail almost as soon as it is asked (by, as it happens, a quick flick of the eyes to the relevant portion of the visual field).
Yet without the hoax, our subjective experience would be strange indeed: we would be tormented by the sense of the world as undergoing remarkable changes as we scan our eyes across it. Objects would suddenly snap into colourful focus, while others would, just as rapidly, be drained of detail and colour. This would, of course, be hugely misleading. Our experience would be suggesting exuberant flux even as we scan and examine an utterly still page of text, painting or scene.
When we consider the purpose of perception, then, the grand illusion is entirely appropriate – indeed, inevitable. Perception tells us about the world around us – the layout of words, faces, objects and patterns – and how to use this knowledge to guide our actions. And the external world is, of course, defined in precise detail and full colour, irrespective of where we happen to be looking at the time or, for that matter, whether our eyes are open or closed, or whether we are even present at all. Our perceptual experience is like a narrator who wishes to remain as unobtrusive as possible – we want to know about the story, not the viewpoint of the storyteller.
The eye and brain deliver us the impression of a fully detailed and colourful world with good reason – for the world is indeed replete with detail and colour. But what the eye and brain do not do, and could not possibly do, is simultaneously deliver us the experience of all the specific colours and details. The brain ‘tells us’ that such colours and details are there – and that, by the mere flick of our eyes, we can, in almost no time at all, read off those colours and focus on those details. So, our sense of a rich sensory world is really a sense of potential : the feeling that we can explore the sensory world at will, uncovering whatever detail we wish.2
But this experience of the potential of a stable external world to yield up colours and details is easily misinterpreted as the experience of simultaneously grasping all possible colour and detail in a single sensory snapshot. So what our sense of the richness of the experienced world is really telling us is that we can, whenever we like, effortlessly and rapidly find out about almost any aspect of the scene before us; no sooner have we wondered about the colour of a friend’s hat, the next word in the sentence, or which book is lying on the table – than, with a barely detectable jump of the eye locking the fovea onto the target of interest, combined with our wonderfully rapid visual processing, we have the answer. And so it is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that we had the answer all along; that, moreover, we had already pre-loaded in our brains all the answers to all manner of possible questions about the scene, the face, or the text, before us.
So we are being hoaxed by our own brains for the most benign of reasons. The world is a stable place; perception is designed to tell us about the world; thus perception gives us a sense of stable awareness of colour and detail across the entire visual image. And it does so even though, outside the tiny window of lucidity, this information isn’t actually captured by the eye or brain at all, but is merely available ‘on demand’.
PIECING TOGETHER THE FRAGMENTS
It is easy to think of our focus of attention as a spotlight – a spatially defined blob of lucidity where our eyes are centred, surrounded by rapidly thickening darkness. But the experience of retinal stabilization tells a different story, as we saw in Chapter 2. The brain focuses on meaningful chunks of the visual image: words, letters, objects and their component parts. The meaningful units need not necessarily correspond to connected regions in space. Our attentional focus can latch onto a scatter of discontinuous items if those items can be grouped into a single ‘object’. Thus we can see an animal moving through dense forest, recognize a person behind a dense wire fence, or find that we can read a distant billboard through the clutter of intervening lamp posts (our ability to group ‘discontinuous’ elements together is illustrated in Figure 9).
It turns out that we can also group together disconnected items that don’t make coherent objects, a topic insightfully explored in theory and experiments by Liqiang Huang (now at the City University of Hong Kong) and one of the world’s leading cognitive psychologists, Hal Pashler (at the University of California, San Diego). Consider, for example, the randomly coloured grids in Figure 10 (here reproduced in shades of grey). Take a few moments to check whether or not the grids in each row are linked by the relationship with which they are labelled – whether they are matching, whether they are symmetric, or whether one grid can be rotated ‘in your mind’s eye’ to fit over the other. This is not easy – we find ourselves needing to check the coloured squares one at a time. There is, though, a shortcut: if we focus on a single colour, then we can pick out the pattern formed by squares of that colour (shown on the right side) for each grid, and compare them rapidly.
To do this, of course, we need to pick out and group together all the items of one colour – say red (represented by light grey in Figure 10) – and separate them from the rest of the image. As we do this, the red items suddenly become a discernible pattern with a clear structure (at the top right of the figure, we see that the ‘red’ squares approximate a diagonal line); and the structures within each pair of items can then readily be compared to see if the two figures match, are symmetric, or are rotated, for that colour. Notice, though, that as soon as we see the red squares form a unified ‘figure’, the colours forming the rest of the grid are no more than an amorphous ‘background’. It is as if we can simultaneously ‘grasp’ items of a single colour, lift them free of the rest of the image, and examine them separately. So, to check possible relationships between whole grids, we do not need to check each coloured square one by one; instead, we need merely to check the patterns for each of the four colours.
Huang and Pashler propose three hypotheses from these and many related observations. Their first hypothesis, which we have already encountered in Chapter 2, is that we can ‘grasp’, or attend to, just one object or pattern at a time: we can hold onto the pattern in the red squares, or the green, or the yellow, or the blue. But we cannot ‘hold’ two patterns in mind at once, just as we can only read one word, or recognize one face, at a time. Only when we can grasp a figure, can we manipulate or transform it, looking for copies or mirror images, or twisting it through 90 degrees in our mind’s eye. It is as if the visual system has a single metaphorical ‘hand’ that can reach out, select and manipulate just one pattern at any moment. If this is right, then perhaps the implications go beyond coloured grids to the claim that we are able only to see one object or pattern at a time, whatever the nature of that object or pattern may be.
This perspective neatly explains why we find it so much easier to relate the patterns shown in Figure 11, which are well-known pictures of animals by the great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). These patterns are, of course, far more complex than Huang and Pashler’s coloured grids, and yet we are able rapidly and effortlessly to see the links between them. But from the ‘one object at a time’ perspective, this is precisely what we should expect: we can easily see that such patterns match, are symmetrical, or are rotated, because each forms a single object, which can be visually grasped, and hence analysed and manipulated, as a whole.
But if we are able only to ‘grasp’ one visual object or pattern at a time, then our brain is successively creating and dissolving such visual objects or patterns as we flick our eyes and/or our attention, to different aspects of our visual input. Wherever we focus our attention, of course, an object or pattern is duly created. So it is so easy to succumb to the illusion that a rich, detailed, colourful visual world of objects and patterns is loaded in our minds in a single visual gulp.
If this story is right, then if we can lock onto the stimulus successfully, and we can disable, or at least impair, the ability to dissolve the pattern and find another, then the background should literally disappear. Indeed, this is precisely what happened in the retinal stabilization experiments we described in Chapter 2. Moving our eyes provides a way to break out of the current pattern by changing the input on which our brain must work, but when moving our eyes no longer changes the input to our retina, then we can no longer dissolve and reconstruct new patterns so easily, and chunks of the visual input vanish.5
What would happen, then, if the brain found it difficult spontaneously to dissolve the current object of interest? Could there be a disorder in which people might perceive just one object or pattern at a time, and lose all sense of the existence of the surrounding items? Later we shall see that there appears to be just such a neurological condition.
Huang and Pashler’s second proposal fills out and makes specific the notion of apprehending a pattern: visually grasping a pattern or object is analogous to ‘highlighting’ the spatial pattern created by the subject (or, as they rather nicely put it, shrink-wrapping it in plastic), so that only that pattern or object is ‘seen’. So, when we ‘see’ one colour in the grids of Figure 10 (say, picking out the cross-shaped figure in ‘yellow’), we are not really ‘seeing’ the other colours at all. We have, of course, a general sense of the extent and complexity of the rest of the pattern – but this is because we can shift our attention to the rest of the pattern at will.6
Huang and Pashler’s third suggestion is that, while our visual grasp can lasso items at many different locations, we can only mentally label items that are lassoed (so, for example, we can label the ‘figure’ as yellow, but we cannot simultaneously label the ‘background’ as having one or more colours). And more than that: all the lassoed items have to receive the same ‘label’ for a particular dimension (e.g. colour). This leads to the astonishing suggestion that, even when looking at a multicoloured image, we are only able to perceive one colour at a time. We can ‘see’ either the red, yellow, green or blue patterns in the coloured grid, but when we focus on one colour, the other colours are ‘gone’. This claim fits with another of the principles we drew from the disintegrating stabilized images – that visual information that is not currently being attended to is largely, or even completely, ignored. But is that right? Can it really be true that, when confronted with a multicoloured image, we can see only one colour at a time?
Now we have already noted that our impression that our subjective experience is fully coloured (and sharply detailed) across the entire visual field must be mistaken. But this leaves open the possibility that we can simultaneously see multiple colours, when those colours are all presented to central vision. For example, look directly at the centre of the circle shown in Figure 12. Certainly, we have the feeling that we are able simultaneously to grasp the blueness (dark grey here) of the blue quarters and the greenness (light grey) of the green quarters. Yet Huang and Pashler’s theory claims that we cannot even do this: that just as we visually grasp the green segments, we must relinquish our grasp of the blue segments. And we are, they claim, unable to ‘see’ the colour of the segments that we are not directly visually grasping. If this is right, our attentional system must be hopping backwards and forwards between the perception of green and the perception of blue – but we are not able to grasp both colours at once.
To test this remarkably counter-intuitive prediction, Huang and Pashler modified an experimental method developed by the psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, John Duncan.7 As outlined in Figure 13a (see next page), Huang and Pashler studied how people perceive images presented as brief flashes which are rapidly ‘overwritten’ by a noisy visual pattern (a ‘mask’). They varied the amount of time for which the stimulus was presented (that is, the length of the flash before it was obliterated by the mask) and measured how accurately people were able to detect whether they had seen a particular colour. The crucial comparison was between the instance when the entire pinwheel was briefly flashed up and when each ‘diagonal’ pair of coloured segments was presented successively. If we are able to ‘see’ both coloured segments at the same time, then people would be just as good at detecting, say, green, when they have just seen both green and blue for, say, 100 milliseconds, or when they have seen green and blue successively, for 100 milliseconds each. If, on the other hand, we can only load one colour at a time, then performance will be worse in the ‘simultaneous’ condition, because the brain will not have had time to switch between the two colours (if the brain happens to load in the blue segments initially, then there may be no time to load the green segments at all, and the green will not be seen). Remarkably, this is precisely what happens; and indeed performance in both tasks is nicely captured by the hypothesis that people are sequentially switching from one colour to the other.
This pattern of results contrasts, crucially, with a variation of the experiment, in which people have to pay attention to two spatial locations, rather than colours (Figure 13b). Here, the results show that we can simultaneously ‘grasp’ two locations just as easily as one location. And this, of course, makes sense: the brain needs to be able to group together multiple locations, even when perceiving a single pattern or object. So while it is possible, not surprisingly, to perceive multiple locations at once, it appears not to be possible to see two colours at once: indeed, it seems that we must switch back and forth between seeing one coloured region and another, but that we do this so quickly and effortlessly that we have the illusion that we are ‘grasping’ two, or many, colours at the same time.9
This perspective has a further, intriguing and direct prediction: that we can only count colours slowly and laboriously. When we have to count spatially distinct items (e.g. blobs), all of which can simultaneously be grasped, we are able to answer whether there are one, two, three or four almost equally rapidly – beyond this our counting becomes slow and laborious. Roughly, this rapid counting appears to occur because we can recognize familiar patterns, for example triangles and squares. But if we are presented with a field of blobs which possess one, two, three or four colours, we do not seem to be able to grasp all these colours at once. The greater the number of colours, the slower our responses: just as if we are flipping from one colour to the next.10
It seems an astonishing affront to common sense to find that, even for items that we are looking at directly, the apparent richness of colour is itself a trick – that our brains seem to be able to encode no more than one colour (or shape, or orientation) at a time. But this is what the data tell us.
The sequential, fragmented view of visual awareness suggests some striking, and rather disturbing, possibilities about what might happen if our visual system is damaged. Suppose, for example, that we lost the ability to ‘ask questions of’ and redirect our eyes to some part of the visual field. Then we should know little about that part of the visual field – or rather, it would only ever be represented in peripheral vision, fuzzy and colourless. But the hoax will cover up this bleached fuzziness – remember that the brain aims to tell us about the world itself, not our view of it – and the brain quite reasonably presumes that the world is not blurry and colourless. So is it possible that our illusion of a rich, detailed visual field might be undisturbed, even though some significant part of the visual field might remain entirely unexplored by our fovea, and hence stay for ever in the shadows? Our perception of the richness and completeness of our subjective world could, in principle, be unchanged even if there were entire regions of the visual scene that we could no longer explore.
People with the medical syndrome of visual neglect show just this pattern. They completely disregard a huge area of visual space (often the entire left side of the visual field) with no disruption in their sense of the completeness and richness of their visual world.
In Figure 14, an eye-tracker traces how a person with left-side neglect looks for Ts against a background of Ls, searching on the right-hand side and rarely scanning their fovea on the left – thus the scan paths in Figure 14 are relentlessly to the right. Copying is often also dramatically affected (Figure 15). A person with neglect typically has relatively normal visual processing in the affected part of the visual field – they simply don’t pay any attention to it. And, rather than sensing an alarming void which might cover fully half of the visual field, they report no change to their subjective experience. Indeed, neglect patients can sometimes feel rather doubtful that they have a visual deficit at all!
Visual neglect arises, it seems, because the brain is unable to attend to a large area of the visual field. According to the intuitive conception that our brains ‘load up’ a detailed and full-colour copy of the entire visual world, we should expect neglect patients to experience a huge and shocking disruption to their inner subjective world. After all, it would seem that half of it has disappeared! Yet neglect patients typically report nothing of the kind. From the point of view of the sequential, fragmentary perspective on perception, this is just what we should expect: we perceive only the parts of the image that we are processing, not those we are not processing. The unattended parts of the image no more ‘feel’ missing than the second half of a novel feels missing, if we never get round to reading it.
I have argued that visual neglect occurs when the brain is unable to ‘question’ or ‘explore’ anything that is in one part of the visual field. What would happen, though, if we were unable to disengage and re-engage our attention freely? Then, surely, the grand illusion would be punctured: we would be aware of the very object or pattern whose meaning we had just constructed – but that would be all we could see.
This is not merely a hypothetical possibility. Patients with the rare neurological condition of simultagnosia have exactly this phenomenology. When a comb is held in front of him, one patient correctly reports seeing a comb; when a spoon is now held up in front of the comb, forming the shape of a cross, he reports seeing only a comb; the spoon, although occupying an overlapping region of the visual field, is not seen. If the spoon and comb are held vertically, side by side, the patient reports seeing the spoon, but denies seeing the comb. The spoon and comb are now held horizontally directly in front of the patient. What does the patient see now, the experimenter asks? The patient responds that he sees what looks like a blackboard with some writing on it – both the spoon and the comb (and, we must presume, the experimenter) have disappeared, and the patient’s brain has locked onto the blackboard on the wall behind.13 So a patient with simultagnosia is able to see objects of different distances and sizes – but has no sense of the continuing existence of the rest of the visual world.
Intuitively, we may imagine that a patient with simultagnosia is restricted to perceiving one object or pattern at a time, whereas people with normal visual abilities are able to perceive any number of objects simultaneously – indeed, surveying the room around us for a moment, we may imagine that we are able to simultaneously ‘take in’ dozens or even hundreds of distinct objects, just as, when we glance at a page of text, we have the sense of simultaneously surveying hundreds of distinct words and thousands of letters. But, as we have seen, to think this way is, of course, to be taken in by the grand illusion: all of us perceive the world through a remarkably narrow channel – roughly a single word, object, pattern or property at a time.
Simultagnosia is a complex and varied disorder. But I wonder if it may represent what happens when a person no longer has the environment available ‘on demand’. A person with simultagnosia is looking at the world through a narrow window, but is no longer able to query any part of the rest of visual world, set off the relevant eye movements, and find the required answer. If this is right, simultagnosia reveals the ‘truth’ about what we all see, moment by moment – it strips away the grand illusion of a cluttered, detailed world, simultaneously loaded in our consciousness.
From time to time, I have found myself wondering, somewhat despairingly, how much the last hundred and fifty years or so of psychology and neuroscience has really revealed about the secrets of human nature. How far have we progressed beyond what we can gather from philosophical reflection, the literary imagination, or from plain common sense? How much has the scientific study of our minds and brains revealed that really challenges our intuitive conception of ourselves?
The gradual uncovering of the grand illusion through careful experimentation is a wonderful example of how startlingly wrong our intuitive conception of ourselves can be. And once we know the trick, we can see that it underlies the apparent solidity of our verbal explanations too. Just as the eye can dash into action to answer whatever question about the visual world I happen to ask myself, so my inventive mind can conjure up a justification for my actions, beliefs and motives, just as soon as I wonder about them. We wonder why puddles form or how electricity circulates around the house – and immediately we find explanations springing into our consciousness. And if we query any element of our explanation, more explanations spring into existence, and so on. Our powers of invention are so fluent that we can imagine that these explanations were pre-formed within us in all their apparently endless complexity. But, of course, each answer was created in the moment.
So whether we are considering sensory experience or verbal explanations, the story is the same. We are, it turns out, utterly wrong about a subject on which we might think we should be the ultimate arbiter: the contents of our own minds. Could we perhaps be equally or even more deluded when we turn to consider the workings of our imagination?