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Learning Every human brain is different. Our individual experiences of the world are different too. "It may seem as though the world just pours itself directly into our minds through the transparent windows of our eyes and our ears. But psychologists have long known that perception is not simply a “read out” of sensory information. We are strongly influenced by context. From the effect of shadows on how we perceive the brightness of a surface, to our tendency to interpret facial expressions depending on what we think is happening, context permeates all our conscious experiences, and it does so in a way that we are typically never aware of. "Some researchers, myself included, go even further. Instead of context merely influencing the contents of perception, the idea here – which builds on the legacy of the great German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz – is that perceptual experience is built from the top down, with the incoming (bottom-up) sensory signals mostly fine-tuning the brain’s “best guesses” of what’s out there. In this view, the brain is continually making predictions about the causes of the sensory information it receives, and it uses that information to update its predictions. In other words, we live in a “controlled hallucination” that remains tied to reality by a dance of prediction and correction, but which is never identical to that reality. "A striking consequence of this is that since we all have different brains, making slightly different best guesses, we will all have different perceptual experiences too – even if we are faced with the same objective external reality. Just as the blueness of the sky may be different for each of us, all our experiences may differ – does a peach taste the same to me as to you? Unlike our external differences, differences in perception are private, subjective – hidden beneath the common language we use to describe them." - Anil Seth |