Brain: Constructs rather than mirrors reality

[coberst]

Brain: Constructs rather than mirrors reality

Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, explains the difficult we have with recognizing and accepting experiences that contradict our anticipations.

Kuhn details some of the problems that arose while scientists discovered such scientific anomalies as X-ray and oxygen.

As Kuhn observed:

“Novelty emerges with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a back drop provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be discovered¦Further acquaintance, however, does result of awareness of something wrong¦[which] opens a period in which perceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated.

He concludes: “What a man sees depends upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

Kuhn provides us with an experiment performed by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman undertaken to illuminate this human characteristic of seeing only what we are prepared to see.

Subjects were shown standard playing cards mixed with the anomalous card a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Subjects repeatedly and erroneously identified the anomalous cards as a six of hearts or a four of spades. Some, even after the experiment was over, displayed confusion and even anger at the experiment. Only after repeated exposures to the cards did the subjects slowly feel something was askew here. Only after forty exposures did the subjects correctly identify the cards.

[Tan]

Hmmm...It all sounds like statistics to me.

My submission in simple terms:

Human nature is that of which we have formed and manipulated into a sculpture of what we call society.

It is because our ancestors and authority figures that have allowed us to shape into such existance that is a phenomenon. It is how we communicate this that discovers from great wonders to the smallest miracles.



And, might I add I great bathroom book is 1000 pearls of wisdom.

[Clodhopper]

One of the things that makes a great artist is the ability to clear the mind (at least to some extent) of these preconceptions and to report the world as they see it then. The painters tend to be first out of the blocks, and the poets follow a decade or two later. Both Romanticism and Modernism followed this trend.

[Clodhopper]

You see I believe we all see at one point in time or another what all artists see


Yesindeedy - but most of the time most of us don't realise we've seen it. I think you've got a point though: I should probably have said that many or most us have this ability, we just don't use it. As coberst mentioned - it can be disturbing!

[coberst]

There is indeed some sensory input that stimulates the reality we create. It is a difficult thing to discuss because we do not have a vocabulary suitable for discussing it. Kant speaks of the thing-in-itself as being that reality out there and we speak of the reality that we know. Our problem lies in that we use the same word "reality" for both because up until recently everyone considered what we know is what is out there.

[Clodhopper]

Yeah, it gets really fun at this point - "the observer changes the observed". In effect we collude with eachother and for most people "reality" is a consensus position. chuckle. I remember getting into some trouble when I was a kid because I see certain colours on the edge of the green/blue spectrum as blue where most others appear to see them as green. I've wondered ever since whether we see even quite basic things (like the sky for example) as the same colour if we cold look through someone else's eyes...