In February 2015, a photo posted on Tumblr went viral on a global scale and inadvertently spoke to the issue of the subjectivity of perception - and spoke loudly. The questions it raised about what we see generated thousands more questions across social media and on TV, as well as in the minds of people who kept their astonishment private. You may or may not have encountered the photo, but if you did you'll remember the image itself gave the phenomenon its name - The Dress.
It started with a wedding in Scotland. The mother of the bride had sent a photo of the dress she was going to wear to her daughter: a straightforward blue gown with stripes of black lace. Yet the photo itself was anything but straightforward for perception. The bride and groom couldn't agree on whether it was white with gold stripes or blue with black stripes. Baffled by their disagreement, they sent the image to people they knew, including their friend Caitlin McNeill, a musician who was performing at the wedding. She nearly missed her stage call because she and her bandmates were arguing about the image. After the wedding, McNeill posted the slightly washed-out photo on her Tumblr page with this caption: "Guys please help me - is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the fuck out." Not long after she published this, the post hit viral critical mass and the photo "broke the internet".
Over the following week The Dress ran its course as most viral phenomena do, with the out-of-nowhere virality becoming as much the story as the item that instigated it. Celebrities tweeted and feuded about it, Reddit threads proliferated and news organisations covered it. Those of us who research colour were suddenly inundated with requests for interviews, as it seemed everyone wanted to know why they saw the colours differently. Even the usually sober Washington Post published a story headlined: "The inside story of the 'white dress, blue dress' drama that divided a planet." Yet in spite of the overheated excitement and debate, people were having an important conversation about science - to be precise, perceptual neuroscience.
It hinted at the way meaning is a plastic entity, much like the physical network of the brain, which we shape and reshape through perceptual experiences. What seemed to grab people was that they were seeing it differently from each other. As the actor and writer Mindy Kaling tweeted on February 25, 2015, "I think I'm getting so mad about the dress because it's an assault on what I believe is objective truth."
This is the crux about perception and self that The Dress brought up for so many: there is an objective "truth" or reality, but our brains don't give us access to it. This brief step into the most fundamental of uncertainties was also exciting for people. #TheDress tapped into not only how perception works, but why it matters so much to us. It illustrates the counter-intuitive nature of our brain. If we saw the world as it really is, then things that are the same should look the same. Likewise, things that are different should look different… always, to everyone.
Yet perceiving light is not as straightforward as it may seem, despite the fact we do it every waking millisecond. The billions of cells and their interconnections devoted to it are evidence of its difficulty. We rely on this perceptual skill to make instinctive decisions that serve us as we move through the world. The Dress, however, revealed that just because we sense light, we don't necessarily see the reality of it.
In the top image, each of the two circles is a different shade of grey. It's easy to perceive the varying gradations. Things that are different should look different, and they do.
Now look at the bottom image. The grey circle on the right inside the dark ring looks lighter than the grey circle on the left inside the white ring. They appear to be two distinct shades of grey. But they're not. They are the exact same grey.
This is the objective reality - which is fundamentally different from our perceptional reality. What is true for vision is indeed true for all of our senses. A very well-known example of tactile "gaps" between perception and reality is called the Rubber-Hand Illusion. In this so-called trick, a person is seated at a table with one hand resting in front of them, while the other is out of sight behind a divider. A fake hand is set down in front of the person in place of the out-of-sight hand, so they have what looks more or less like their two hands resting on the table, except one of them isn't theirs (which of course they're aware of). Then the "experimenter" begins lightly brushing the fingers of the hidden real hand and the fake visible hand at the same time. Sure enough, the person immediately starts identifying with the fake hand as if it were theirs, feeling as if the brushing sensation is happening not behind the hidden divider, but on the fake hand they suddenly feel connected to. For perception purposes, the hand becomes real.
The Rubber-Hand Illusion is what's called a body transfer, but our brain's way of processing reality, rather than giving it to us directly, also opens us up to other slightly freaky "mix-ups" of the senses. Researchers have shown, for example, that we are capable of hearing phantom words. When listening to nonsense sounds, our brains pick out clear-seeming words that aren't actually there in the audio. There is also the Barber's Shop Illusion, in which a recording of snipping scissors gives the impression of the sound getting closer or further away depending on the volume rising or lowering, when the sound isn't changing position at all.
Most people assume we see the world accurately as it really is, even many neuroscientists, psychologists and cognitive scientists, because, well, why wouldn't we? At first glance, it seems a wholly bad idea to see it in any other way. The seemingly logical premise that we see reality, however, doesn't take into account a fundamental fact about ecology and how our minds actually operate therein, thus missing the essential truth that our brains didn't evolve that way. But then what did our brains evolve to do? They evolved to survive - and that's it.
Adapting is what our species (and all other species) has been doing since day one. Our brain simply looks for ways to help us survive, some banal (find food, eat it), others wildly innovative (use your ears to see). This is why active engagement is so important: it taps into a neurological resource that is core to your biology, and can lead to innovations in perception that have a physical basis in the brain, if you know how to exploit it. Such experimentation is the cutting edge of neural engineering.
For nearly a decade, the Magnetic Perception Group, a research initiative at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, has studied "the integration of new sensory modalities using a novel sensory-augmentation device that projects the direction of the magnetic north on the wearer's waist".
It is a description of the feelSpace belt, an experimental device expanding the frontier of human perception and behaviour. The belt is rigged with a compass set to vibrate toward Earth's magnetic north, giving the wearer an enhanced sense of sorts, and an opportunity for adaptation. For its most recent study, published in 2014, the group had participants wear the feelSpace belt every day for seven weeks. The goal was to study sensorimotor contingencies, a theoretical set of laws governing actions and the related sensory inputs. "I was a subject in one of the first studies," says Peter König, head of the Magnetic Perception Group, "and for me it was [a] very playful time."
The people who wore the belt experienced dramatic changes in their spatial perception. They developed a heightened sense of cardinal directions and an improved "global ego-centric orientation" (knowledge of where they were). But for a more vivid sense of what wearing the belt was like, it's best just to read the accounts of the participants, which are both concrete and poetic: "Now that my maps have all been newly realigned, the range of the maps has been much increased. From here I can point home - 300 kilometres - and I can imagine - not only in 2D bird's eye perspective - how the motorways wind through the landscape."
The work of König and his team shows that we can augment our perception and thus our behaviour by playing with the contingencies of our brain's neural model.
For this to happen, it means that physiologically the participants' brains changed - in two months. They engaged with the world in a new way and created a new history of interpreting information. As König says, "Your brain is big enough that you can learn anything. The only limitation is the time to train the senses."
All they were doing was only what humans have always done: make sense of their senses. But you don't need a laboratory-designed belt or other apparatus to do this. We have the process of evolution in our heads.
Can you find the predator in the picture above? Ninety per cent of the information is available to see it. It is there. If you have not found it after a few seconds, then you're dead. (Scroll down the page for the reveal.)
Useful interpretation means we survived, and thus archives itself as part of the history that will inform our future perception. Objective reality is a coincidence at best.
The challenges of learning a foreign language also show how the brain's never-ending search for usefulness plays out in our own ears and mouths. Many anglophones experience challenges with the rolled Spanish r. Pretty much anyone who's ever tried to learn a foreign language encounters sounds that are, well, foreign. A well-known example: when speaking English, Japanese people often say "Herro" instead of "Hello". This happens because they literally do not hear the difference between the r and l sounds. It's not that their language doesn't contain these sounds, because it does. Rather, it's because their language doesn't make a distinction between them. They have no perceptual past in which it was useful to make a distinction, so accuracy doesn't matter.
Our perception of colour also embodies the brain's reliance on usefulness instead of accuracy. While light physically exists along a linear spectrum, the way our visual cortex organises it is by breaking light into four categories that form a circle: red, green, blue and yellow.
Since the human brain processes light categorically into redness, greenness, blueness and yellowness, this means that we are only able to see other colours as limited combinations among these four (we can't see red-greens or blue-yellows). Our perception takes the two extremes of the line of light - short wavelengths at one end, long wavelengths at the other - and bends them back until they touch and form a circle. The consequence is that the two ends of the continuum are perceptually similar, while they are actually opposite. Our brain evolved to perceive light categorically - usefully, but not at all accurately - because it is an extremely efficient way of perceiving visual stimuli that allows us to save brain cells to devote to the neuro-processing of our other senses.
Likewise, pain is a physiological perception. It makes actionable meaning out of information that is inherently meaningless, causing our brain to interpret it as an event we must defend ourselves against. Our history of responding this way to our screaming nociceptors is why our species is still here. This leads us to a profound truth that lays bare the truth of every single one of your behaviours. All perception is your brain's construction of past utility (or "empirical significance of information").
Your brain is, at its core, a statistical distribution. Thus, your history of experiences creates a database of useful past perceptions. New information is constantly flowing in, and your brain is constantly integrating it into this statistical distribution that creates your next perception. As such, your perception is subject to a statistical phenomenon known in probability theory as kurtosis. Kurtosis in essence means that things tend to become increasingly steep in their distribution... that is, skewed in one direction. Things that are highly kurtotic, or skewed, are hard to shift away from.
Read more: Theory claims to offer the first 'evidence' our Universe is a hologram
The good news is kurtosis can work to your advantage. Imagined perception is self-reinforcing, so by taking control of it you can alter the subjective reality that your brain's interpretations create. Think positively today and it's statistically more likely you will do the same tomorrow. This seemingly soft truism has in fact been borne out by hard science. The psychologist Richard Wiseman pioneered the systematic study of chance and luck. He has found that people who are consistently lucky in life share patterns of believing things will work out well in the end; being open to experience; not ruminating on disappointing outcomes; and looking at mistakes as learning opportunities. It will likely come as no surprise that the same self-reinforcing perceptual and behavioural momentum also applies to negativity.
A concept crucially connected to this facet of perception is confirmation bias. This describes the tendency to perceive in such a way as to confirm your already established point of view. It is present in everything from the way you argue to how you behave in relationships and at work. It even structures what you remember, shaping your memories according to your ideas about yourself (which are often incorrect).
Political parties, jingoism, sports fandom and religion all suffer from cognitive bias. Such biases also shape the history of whole peoples, as is the case with the sexes. Historically, the prominence of women (educationally, professionally and civically) in western society was retarded in several ways, not just by the mis/disinformation men promulgated about their abilities, but by women's own internalisation of it.
Confirmation bias is a reminder that we don't have access to reality. We perceive (or indeed, in this case, find) the version of reality with which we are familiar… and often that makes us look good. For instance, if you ask a large room of people (especially men) who are a random sampling of the population at large, "How many here are better than average drivers?" the vast majority typically raise their hands. Sorry, but this isn't possible. Not everyone can be above average. Yet our blindness to our biases makes it exceedingly difficult to notice them.
You have deep assumptions - a result of your empirical history of trial-and-error experience, whether it's internal or external. They necessarily limit what you think, do and feel. But in doing so they can destroy relationships and careers. Deviation from self-sabotaging or even just familiar behaviours begins (but doesn't end) with a disarmingly simple first step: awareness. Awareness that you have assumptions, and that you are defined by them. Seeing differently - to deviate - begins with knowing some of those often invisible assumptions that maintained your survival in the past may no longer be useful.
So how do we see things differently? We change our past.
Questioning our assumptions is what provokesrevolutions, be they tiny or vast, technological or social. Studying the brain has shown me that creativity is in fact not "creative" at all, and that, at heart, "genius" emerges from simply questioning the right assumption in a powerful, novel way. The iPhone closed the gap between our long-standing physical lives and our now- parallel digital lives, yet the steps taken to create the iPhone were small, each initiated by a question… in particular the question "Why?" Apple didn't magically teleport to the iPhone. Steve Jobs, Jony Ive and the whole company had "why-asking" past patterns of perception, which made ideas that would seem literally unthinkable to another person feel intuitively logical to them.
To question begins a "quest", and a journey into the unknown. The most insightful quest begins with "Why?", especially when targeted at what you assume to be true already. Because your truths are highly connected assumptions, change them and you may change the whole system. This will mean the next step you take into that new space of possibility will be "creative". Here choice begins, and in making this choice, you begin the process of changing your future.
Creativity is in fact a very basic, accessible process. It's all about changing your space of possibility by questioning the assumptions that delineate its dimensions. It is, therefore, misleading to divide (or self-identify) the world into "creative" and "non-creative" people. In a dynamic world, we're all hungry fish needing to thrive… meaning we all need to deviate and therefore start with questions rather than answers, in particular the question "Why?". This process of questioning assumptions is within reach.
At the end of a dimly lit hallway on the fifth floor of the Valley Life Sciences building at the University of California, Berkeley, stands a nondescript door. Behind the door is a strange and revolutionary space within four large adjoining rooms. A latticework of struts and supports hangs from the ceiling, connected to electric cords, wiring and flood lamps. Computers and video cameras abound, along with engineering tools and circuit boards. Most striking of all, on nearly every surface sprawl small robots that look like insects or reptiles… not just a bit like them, but remarkably so. When I step inside a narrow room and ask a student what brought her here, she replies, "Cockroaches."
This is the Poly-PEDAL Lab of the biologist Robert Full. PEDAL stands for Performance, Energetics, Dynamics, Animals and Locomotion. Full and his sundry collaborators, from undergrad college students to renowned experts in wildly diverse fields, have excited scientists and non-scientists alike with their discoveries. The Poly-PEDAL Lab has solved the millennia-old mystery of why geckos are able to stick to walls: by using van der Waals forces, an incredibly complex rule of intermolecular attraction and repulsion.
They have answered the question of why cockroaches can flip around at top speed and keep moving upside down: hind legs with adhesive hairs that hook on to a surface and let them swing into a "rapid inversion". And they have uncovered how weaver spiders move efficiently across mesh surfaces that have only 90 per cent of the surface area as compared with solid surfaces: through a foldable spine that allows them to spread contact on to different parts of their legs. The Lab has asked some of the greatest and (in hindsight) most insightful questions about the most inexplicable phenomena of natural biomechanics… and answered them, too. Their answers aren't just interesting in and of themselves; they also reveal a powerful principle at work.
Full's goal isn't just to unlock these mysteries. As the Lab's credo states about the critters whose bodies they model, "We do not study them because we like them. Many of them are actually disgusting, but they tell us secrets of nature that we cannot find out from studying one species, like humans." Full's goal is to apply these "architectural secrets" to human endeavours through advances in robotics, thus reverse-engineering (up to a point) facets of the creatures whose movements he and his labmates study.
He has had nearly unprecedented success doing this, essentially creating the new field and design philosophy of biological inspiration, as well as other subfields such as terradynamics (how things move on surfaces, as opposed to aerodynamics) and robustness (how structures achieve their most robust form). One innovation to come out of his lab is Rhex, a cockroach-inspired robot that can traverse terrain better than any previous experiment in bionics. The US military has deployed it in Afghanistan, reducing violent encounters by sending in Rhex to clear areas before soldiers go in themselves.
In spite of the parade of breakthroughs the Poly-PEDAL Lab has produced, Full himself is a humble, unprepossessing man who values collaboration over ego, and exploration over prestige. With a full head of silky white hair and a charismatic walrus-like moustache, he isn't driven by the usual ambitions.
He is like a brilliant, caring uncle, as gentle as he is wise and experienced. As he was one of my supervisors when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley many years ago, I know this first-hand. "It's in the curiosity," says Full.
Full's job is not - as was once the case for leadership - to have all the answers. Rather, it's to have the good questions. Asking great questions that disrupt is not enough, however. A great leader must also create a space for others to step into uncertainty and to flourish. This is why he chooses to work with people who will welcome the ways he disrupts conventional thinking in order to create new opportunities. As such, he has created a lab based on the solution evolution itself has given us to uncertainty. What is this solution?
It is a way of being that can profoundly change how we live… a way of being that applies to most things innovative and path-breaking, a way of being that is defined by five principles:
**I.**Celebrating uncertainty: to approach "stopping" and all the questions this stopping spawns from the perspective of gain, not loss.**II.**Openness to possibility: to encourage the diversity of experience that is the engine of change, from social changes to evolution itself.**III.**Co-operation: to find value and compassion in the diversity of a group or system, which expands its space of possibility - ideally, combining naïvety with expertise.**IV.**Intrinsic motivation: to let the process of creativity be its own reward, which will enable persistence in the face of tremendous adversity.V. Intentional action: ultimately, to act with awareness… to engage consciously, from the perspective of why.
Extracted from Deviate: the Science of Seeing Differently by Beau Lotto (Orion, £20), out April 27
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
