Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

by Beau Lotto

Assumptions are deeply physiological… electrical, in fact. They are not just abstract ideas or concepts. They are physical things in your brain, with their own sort of physical “laws.” This is what one could call the neuroscience of bias. The reality we see projected on the “screen” of perception begins with the flow of information our five senses take in. This stimulus (or stimuli if there are more than one) creates a series of impulses at your receptors that move into your brain (the input), becoming distributed across the different parts of your cortex and other areas of your brain until they eventually settle on activating a response (motor and/or perceptual… though the separation between motor and perceptual isn’t as distinct as was once thought). That is basically the whole of neuroscience in one sentence, with an emphasis on “basically.” Perception is nothing more than a complex reflex arc, not unlike that which causes your leg to kick out when the doctor hits your patellar tendon underneath your kneecap.