Deviate, p.25
Deviate, page 25
Because we now know that our perception enables us to experience life out there usefully. This is a tremendous gift earned over the cost of eons of evolution, years of development, and moments of learning through trial and—in particular—error (since form follows failure, not success). The embodiment of perception inside our brains in the experience of objects out there is the reason we feel we are seeing reality, although our perceptions themselves, as we know now, aren’t reality. Everything you see—everything—exists in only one place: in here. Inside your head. Everything you experience is only taking place inside your brain and body, constructed in “the space between,” arising from the ecology of interaction between you and your world of others, and in the space between you and the world of yourself.
It doesn’t feel this way because we project perceptions that were created in the space between (i.e., arising from interactions between things) onto stuff out there. Thus, a red surface may appear one meter in front of you, but in fact it couldn’t be closer… the red of that surface is inside you. It’s as if our eyes and all our other senses combine with the rest of our brain to create a video projector. The world out there is really just our three-dimensional screen. Our receptors take the meaningless information they receive; then our brain, through interacting with the world, encodes the historical meaning of that information, and projects our subjective versions of color, shape, and distance onto things. In this sense, the ancient Greeks were close to the metaphysical truth with the emission theory of vision propounded by Plato and others, which claimed that we saw by way of streams of light that flowed out of our eyes.
Our perceptions are the feedback onto our perceptions, creating a self-reinforcing narrative, albeit an effective one for survival, and one that makes life livable. What you perceive right now is a consequence of the history of your perceptions that led to this point. And as soon as you perceive it, that perception too becomes part of your future past, thereby contributing to what you will see in the future. This is why free will lives less in the present and more in the re-meaning of past perceptions in order to change your reflexive perceptions in the future. All these meanings, including the meaning of ourselves and other people, are projected out there, just as we project attributes onto water, surfaces, and other objects, which we see as having different meanings in different contexts. Of course, when the other object is another human being, this process is much more complex, if not the most complex in nature. Your brain can only sense their stimuli (their sounds, their reflected light, their movement), not their meaning of self or their perceived meanings of you, since you can never be inside their head.
Instead, we project everything we perceive onto the world, including the world of others: their beauty, their emotions, their personalities, their hopes, and their fears. This isn’t a philosophical position; this is a scientific explanation that I hope fundamentally changes the way you look at your thoughts and behaviors, and the thoughts and behaviors of others. While what you perceive about another person is indeed in reference to your interactions with them, your perceptions still take place internally to you, though they arise from the dialectic space between you and them. This means that their personality is in a very literal sense your personality transposed. Their fears are your fears transposed. Yes, people do exist objectively… just not for us, ever. Likewise, other people’s perceptions of you are exactly the same. You too are created as a function of them. You contain all the personalities, fears, and colors of others you perceive.
We feel so deeply connected to other human beings—and we are deeply connected to other human beings—that it can feel frightening, perhaps even somehow cheapening, to know that they are just figments of our brain and body. So when I fall in love or have a profound or meaningful experience with others, is it really a Matrix-like dream inside my brain? In a sense, yes, but just like with a surface, with people there is an objective constancy that transcends their ambiguities that the brain must interpret.
This is their why.
In our search for certainty in an inherently uncertain life, we’re often trying to find the constant in other people, and also in ourselves. In much the same way, we look for the invariant aspects of an object, such as its reflectance properties, which in color vision is called color constancy. We’re effectively looking for character constancy in people, so that we can predict their behavior. Through prediction we feel familiarity, and in familiarity we feel secure, since to predict in evolution was to survive. In security, we are able to engage in the active vulnerability that creates trust and lets us feel love and be loved. It is possible that it is this consistency, this elusive constant that deviates from an average, that we are trying to touch in others… what we might call their soul. But this constant that others possess isn’t a normative thing… it’s their personal deviation.
The connections we feel with other people are the way our projections interact. So what we need to teach our children and each other is the ability to “just stop” when listening, not only while in conflict but always—in order to listen differently. Listening is the diminishment of the answers we project onto the world. It lets in the possibility of the question, the possibility that through questions my assumptions might come to map onto your assumptions, which is when we feel “connected.” Or, alternatively, it reveals where our assumptions conflict, giving us the opportunity to be affected and enriched by spaces of possibility divergent from our own. The barrier to accepting the full humanity of others is often a lack of awareness of our own humanity, since our overriding impression is that what we see, hear, and know is the world as it really is. But we don’t, which I hope inspires compassion. Indeed, this has been my primary motivation in writing Deviate… to inspire compassion through scientific understanding, and in doing so create the possibility of the great things that compassion (and humility), when combined with courage, creates.
By understanding how thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are intrinsically relative to one’s physical, social, and cultural ecology, one can better understand the source of coherence and conflict within and between individuals. By re-seeing the process through which we are shaped by our communities, and remeaning our historical experiences, we feel a stronger sense of skepticism and, through this, also a sense of belonging and connectedness… and thus courage and respect for ourselves and all things and people around us. This conception of communities encourages us to be still more humble, as it illustrates that all of us are defined by a collective ecology. So choose that ecology well, because your brain will adapt to it.
In fact, now that you know why we see what we do, to not enter conflict with doubt is to enter with ignorance, since intelligence is to not keep repeating the same behavior in the hope of a different outcome. At the heart of “seeing yourself see differently” is a rational reason for courage… the courage to occupy spaces of uncertainty. When my daughter Zanna was a child and would come to me and say she was scared to go on stage and dance, or my sons Misha and Theo go and play on a new team, or when Isabel followed bonobos in the jungles of the Congo, or my mum went to nursing school with five kids at home, or my father started his own business with little support, or my deaf great-grandmother crossed the sea to an unknown world on her own… my goodness, what a collection of “bad” ideas. So I completely agree with them. It is scary, and rightly so. Writing this book was scary, too. Doing anything that might result in utter failure is scary, and the more public that failure, the worse the fear, since we evolved a “social brain” that gives us the need to belong. Thus, to embark on what might result in failure is objectively a bad idea. When all is good around you, why on earth would you want to see what is on the other side of the hill? What an utterly bad idea, since—remember—there are more ways to die in the world than there are to survive. Yet remember those pathologically courageous fish who leave the safety of the school, risking everything but finding food?
Each of us has each kind of fish inside us. So hearing the stories of Isabel in the jungle or seeing my kids embarking on new experiences in spite of the tremendous possibility of failure… that is inspiring. We can also find tremendous inspiration in elderly people who have remained open. For a young person to do something that might fail, for a twenty-something to “fail forward” in Silicon Valley, is one thing. Relatively speaking, there’s not as much to lose (though it may feel otherwise). However, when you’ve had the experience of life, of actual failure, of responsibility for many others, and you know the real, tangible cost of failure, but step into uncertainty anyway, that is truly amazing. That is inspiration incarnate. We all know these older people. For me, a clear personal example is a man named Yossi Vardi, who is one of the leading technology investors in Israel… but who is also so much more than this. He brings together the interested and interesting from around the world in his incredibly playful Kinnernet meetings, which embody the ecology of innovation that challenges assumptions, or in the school he supports for underprivileged children, which challenges the status quo of governments, and even the assumptions of age. Evidence is the fact that in his mid-seventies he is one of our favorite guests at Burning Man. And yet too often we distance ourselves from people of his age, sometimes because they reveal to us our own assumptions and biases, and even our humanity. Yet they are so often the ones who enable us to powerfully deviate, if we were to just give in to listening.
Research has shown that when it comes to a sense of well-being, it’s difficult to beat the neurological effects of giving. This isn’t to say that all behaviors aren’t selfish. They are, in that they are directly (for the most part) aimed at increasing our own sense of value, which is a deep neurological need. I’ve argued in this book that nearly all of our perceptions, conceptions, and behaviors are in one way or another linked to uncertainty… either a move toward it or, more often than not, a move away from it. The deeper question, then, is how much value one adds to others in the genesis of one’s own value. Might this be where we have choice? If we don’t have free will in the moment… as what we do now is a reflex grounded in a history of meanings, this means that free will isn’t about the present at all. It is about making a new future past. By choosing to re-mean the meanings of a past experience, you alter the statistics of your past meanings, which then alters future reflexive responses. You change what you’re capable of.
The science of perception gives you the permission to become an observer of your own perceptions, and in doing so also gives you the need to thoughtfully deviate again and again, in order to discover the questions worth asking that might change our world… or might not.
Welcome to the Lab of Misfits.
To be is to be perceived.
—George Berkeley
MORE PRAISE FOR DEVIATE
“Combining evolutionary imperatives with modern imaging of the brain, Deviate helps us understand perception as the key to an individual’s survival. It is written with humor, clarity, and delight. I highly recommend it.”
—Jerry Harrison, lead guitarist of the Talking Heads
“It’s time to deviate! Citizens of the world seem stuck in their paths, and are losing perception of what’s there to enjoy as the mundane traps us in our tracks and routines. Beau Lotto teases our sense of adventure by suggesting we romp through our perceptions and break out of the framework. Deviate will give you a sense of yourself, whether you’re a misfit or wish you were one!”
—Marian Goodell, co-founder and CEO of Burning Man
“What if we all tried harder to be misunderstood? And what if we could embrace and channel our own misunderstanding of the world around us? Beau Lotto’s Deviate honors the messy, imperfect genius of human perception as the most valuable resource for creative progress. Lotto is teaching us something so loudly fundamental to our existence, it seems almost impossible that we’ve missed it.”
—Ross Martin, executive vice president of Marketing Strategy and Engagement at Viacom
“In Deviate, Beau Lotto’s remarkable research into human perception is crystallized into a series of astute explanations of how we experience reality. By bringing together an ‘ecology of the senses’ that goes beyond the mechanisms of the eye, Lotto’s ingenious account of the brain’s perceptive evolution arrives at an extraordinary proposition of how we can go beyond our current ways of seeing.… It is a brilliant book!”
—Hans-Ulrich Obrist, director of the Serpentine Galleries and author of The Interview Project
“Beau Lotto has delivered a fresh, provocative, stimulating, revealing, neuro-inspired, entertaining text on that most fugitive of subjects—reality.… The world of theoretical and experimental neuroscience has much to offer us as we search to produce better environments for all.”
—Ian Ritchie, director of Ian Ritchie Architects and architect of the largest free-standing glass building in the world
“Beau Lotto shows better than anyone else how dependent we are upon our own limited sensory perceptions of the world. The radical thesis that he presents in Deviate reveals to us that reality is relative, and that we, ultimately, are capable of changing our world through changing our perception of it.”
—Oafur Eliasson, sculpture artist and spatial researcher, founder of Studio Olafur Eliasson
“In a brilliant and skillful way, Beau Lotto pulls the rug from under our naive view of reality—bit by bit. In reading this book, we discover how our conventional way of seeing, of perceiving reality, is incomplete and illusory. He begins to dismantle this illusion by showing us why we see the world the way we do and, in doing so, he opens the curtain to a new beginning—a new beginning of seeing past our individual interpretation of reality, to recognize that others may surely have a different interpretation. In daring us to deviate, Lotto encourages us to discover that compassion has a root that can be revealed through scientific insights.”
—Peter Baumann, founder of Tangerine Dream
“Beau Lotto is one of the most creative scientists I know, and his passion for introducing neuroscience to the public ranks him among those rare communicators like Carl Sagan whose ideas can change people’s thinking. At a time when many neuroscientists are pursuing the mindless goal of mapping all the connections in the human brain, Beau is right on target in his conviction that science advances by doubting the conventional wisdom and asking simple questions in a novel way.”
—Dale Purves, professor emeritus at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and member of the National Academy of Sciences
“As a neuroscientist and a specialist in vision, Beau Lotto opens up the subject of just how it is possible to actually see and understand anything in the world when it seems that meanings are always constructed somehow separately from the reality of what we see. This is done with immense clarity and ease… directly relevant to anyone involved in shaping our world—designers, engineers, and architects.”
—Alan Penn, professor of architectural and urban computing at University College London
“If someone else told me that reality is something we create in our heads—I’d up my medication. This brilliantly written book shows us that this is actually the road to liberation. We have the ability to change our internal landscapes, making our lives a masterpiece rather than a ‘been there done that’ cliché.”
—Ruby Wax, OBE, comedian, actress, mental health campaigner, and bestselling author of How Do You Want Me?
NOTES
1. Rishi Iyengar, “The Dress That Broke the Internet, and the Woman Who Started It All,” Time Magazine, Feburary 27, 2015, accessed March 3, 2015, http://time.com/3725628/the-dress-caitlin-mcneill-post-tumblr-viral/
2. Terrence McCoy, “The Inside Story of the ‘White Dress, Blue Dress’ Drama That Divided a Planet,” The Washington Post, February 27, 2015, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/27/the-inside-story-of-the-white-dress-blue-dress-drama-that-divided-a-nation/
3. The three articles: Karl R. Gegenfurtner et al., “The Many Colours of ‘The Dress,’” Current Biology 25 (2015): 543–44; Rosa Lafer-Sousa et al., “Striking Individual Differences in Color Perception Uncovered by ‘The Dress’ Photograph,” Current Biology 25 (2015): 545–46; Alissa D. Winkler et al., “Asymmetries in Blue–Yellow Color Perception and in the Color of ‘The Dress,’” Current Biology 25 (2015): 547–48.
4. This and following three quotes taken from George Henry Lewes, The Life of Goethe (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1864), 98, 37, 33, 281.
5. Dennis L. Sepper, “Goethe and the Poetics of Science,” Janus Head 8 (2005): 207–27.
6. Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2003).
7. Dennis Sepper, email messages, November 11, 2014–November 14, 2014.
8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors (London: John Murray, 1840), 196.
9. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), verse 1717.
10. This and other Berkeley quotes taken from: George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Project Gutenberg, 2003), Kindle edition.
11. A. A. Luce, Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (San Francisco: Greenwood Press, 1949), 189–90.
12. Christopher Hogg et al., “Arctic Reindeer Extend Their Visual Range into the Ultraviolet,” Journal of Experimental Biology 214 (2011): 2014–19.
13. Tsyr-Huei Chiou et al., “Circular Polarization Vision in a Stomatopod Crustacean,” Current Biology 18 (2008): 429–34.
