Since Plato, philosophers have had doubts about how our senses provide knowledge of the external world. But surely we are the ultimate arbiters of the contents of the “inner world” of our minds? More than a century of psychology and neuroscience suggests quite the opposite. Our sense that we can inspect our own thoughts and feelings is an illusion; and almost everything we think we know about our minds is false.
Daniel Dennett’s classic Consciousness Explained takes apart our intuitions about our minds, and finds them riddled with confusion and contradiction. The mind is, Dennett suggests, a spectacular confabulator, generating a stream of partial and contradictory representations of the world. It is a storyteller that presents us with a series of sketchy and incompatible drafts, and has us believe they are a unified and fully detailed narrative.Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have pioneered experiments exploring one of Dennett’s themes: the gap between our sense that we experience a rich, multicoloured world and the stark reality: that we see the world through a remarkably narrow “window” of attention. Their book The Invisible Gorilla outlines their most famous experiment: counting the number of times a group of people completely miss a person, dressed as a gorilla, right before our eyes. The phenomenon of “inattentional blindness” is the starting point for a catalogue of astonishing demonstrations.
J Kevin O’Regan helped discover an equally astonishing phenomenon. Presented with rapidly alternating frames of a photograph, even with huge changes, we often see nothing amiss. The sense that we “take in” the photo turns out to be an illusion. What, then, does it mean to be conscious of any aspect of the perceptual world? In Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell, O’Regan puts forward a fascinating and daring theory of the nature of conscious experience – as depending on the “loop” between our actions and our senses – that turns our intuitions upside down.
Like our perceptual experiences, our feelings turn out to be flimsy constructions, created in the moment rather than welling up from mysterious mental depths. In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett reveals how the very idea of “raw” emotion is an illusion. Instead, our emotions are interpretations of our physiological state – and the world around us. For example, so the very same kick of adrenalin could, for example, be interpreted as the thrill of anticipation or abject terror as we are about to walk on-stage: which interpretation we alight upon may, of course, be the difference between a fluent performance and a panic attack. By changing how we understand the world and our body state, we alter how we feel: our emotions are our own creations.
Finally, Donald Hoffman’s Visual Intelligence is a dazzling tour of the cleverness lurking unnoticed within each of us. The process of constructing a visual world from the tickling of our retinal cells turns out to be spectacularly complex, requiring inferences to be carried within a few hundred milliseconds. Hoffman’s catalogue of illusions, including all manner of objects that we “see” but, on closer inspection, turn out to be entirely fictitious, is amazing. More amazing still is the cleverness he reveals our visual brain to embody – in contrast to our slow and lumbering train of conscious thought. About half of our brain is devoted to perception, rather than higher “abstract” thought; read Hoffman’s book and we begin to understand why.
Nick Chater’s The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind is published by Allen Lane.
