Believing is Seeing

You know that old quote, ‘seeing is believing’? Well, it isn’t. A far more accurate saying would be ‘believing is seeing’. The thing about seeing is that it isn’t half as straight forward as we’d like to believe. In order to see anything, we have to make so many assumptions and take so many short cuts that really we shouldn’t trust our eyes very far at all.

The problem with seeing is, quite simply, that we have to ascertain a three dimensional world from a two dimensional image (the image thrown on your retina is, of course, only two dimensional, seeing as the back of the eyeball – though curved – is basically still 2D).

So, in order to form a picture, our brain has to make a huge number of assumptions, such as straight lines are edges, colours are normally uniform (meaning that if colour changes it must be shading and therefore the object must be curved) and objects remain the same colour, even if they may appear a different colour in a different lighting; to give you an example, if you take a piece of coal in sunlight and you take a snowball at night time they actually radiate off the same amount of light; the only reason that you see the snow ball as white and the piece of coal as black is because your mind makes an assumption based on the available light (see this example).

Another good example is that we have just as big a space in our mind reserved for face recognition as for every other object in the physical world. Faces immediately draw our eyes, are immediately analysed and have layers of meaning automatically associated with them that no other object will ever have. Faces are, in terms of data collection, like lighthouses burning in the night. The only reason we don’t realise how much more attention we pay to them (and how much extra processing goes on) is because we’ve always been doing it! We just don’t know any different.

If you don’t believe me, just look at many autistic people. They have the problem that they see faces the same as every other object; and as a result find it very difficult to glean the amount of meaning from them as ‘normal’ people do. The result is that they can’t understand nuances that the rest of us get, based on body language analysis; which in turn means that they seem to waltz across social graces without nary a backwards glance, unaware of the insult they cause.

We have shape recognition ‘software’ in built, especially towards human shapes (as humans were the most dangerous creatures around for our ancestors, even 100,000 years ago). This might well be the reason that often you think you see a person out of the corner of your eye and when you turn to look more carefully you realise it’s just a bunch of clothes. It’s better to have a false positive (as in see a shape where there is none) then to not see an approaching enemy; erring on the side of caution, if you will.

The thing is that we do this with every single one of our senses, interpreting through unconscious assumptions, as we would never be able to understand the raw data. For example, when somebody speaks, we hear individual words, when in truth there’s a continuous stream of sounds (with no breaks).

So, just because you think you saw something, heard something or realised something, doesn’t mean it’s true. It might well be your overactive interpretation mechanisms making you think something happened, when in truth it was just a misinterpretation of a natural event.

Yes, that does mean that not even your senses can be trusted. Bugger, aye?