Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

by Beau Lotto

The only true voyage of discovery… [would be] to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another. —Marcel Proust

In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we can never have access to the Ding an sich, the unfiltered “thing-in-itself ” of objective reality.

We do not experience the world as it is because our brain didn’t evolve to do so.

Our sense of self, our most essential way of understanding existence, begins and ends with perception.

Uncertainty is the problem that our brains evolved to solve. Resolving uncertainty is a unifying principle across biology, and thus is the inherent task of evolution, development, and learning.

An increasingly connected world is also inherently more unpredictable.

The biological motivation of many of our social and cultural habits and reflexes, including religion and politics, and even hate and racism, is to diminish uncertainty through imposed rules and rigid environments… or in one’s vain attempt to disconnect from a world that lives only because it is connected and in movement. In doing so, these inherited reflexes—by design—prevent us from living more creative, compassionate, collaborative, and courageous lives. With the making of this kind of certainty, we lose… freedom.

This is what transformation looks like: Deviation toward oneself.

Nothing interesting ever happens without active doubt. Yet doubt is often disparaged in our culture because it is associated with indecision, a lack of confidence, and therefore weakness. Here I will argue exactly the opposite.

Doubt is the genesis of powerful, deviating possibilities. In this way, the human brain is able to shed constricting assumptions and see beyond the utility with which the past has trained it to see. As I like to say, the cash is in the questions.

what makes the human brain beautiful is that it is delusional.

We can all hold mutually exclusive realities in our minds at the same time, and “live” them out imaginatively.

True knowledge is when information becomes embodied understanding: We have to act in the world to understand it.

The Dress phenomenon was a perfect example of how meaning creates meaning (as news agencies around the world started reporting a story largely because it was being reported elsewhere and therefore assumed to be meaningful, and thereby making it meaningful), which is a fundamental attribute of perception itself.

In May 2015, for example, Current Biology simultaneously published three studies of The Dress. One found that the distribution of colors of the dress corresponded to “natural daylights,” which makes it harder for your brain to differentiate sources of light from surfaces that reflect light (more on this in the next chapter). Another study made a discovery about how the brain processes the color blue, revealing that things have a greater probability of appearing white or gray to the human eye when “varied along bluish directions.” The last study, which surveyed 1,401 participants, found that 57 percent see the dress as blue/black, while the white/gold perception of the dress was more common in older people and women. Additionally, on a second viewing, participants’ perception sometimes switched white/gold to blue/back, or vice versa.

What is true for vision is indeed true for every one of our senses. What people realized about the subjectivity of their sight also goes for every other facet of their “reality”: there are illusions in sound, touch, taste, and smell, too.

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 outof-sight hand, so they have what looks more or less like their two hands resting on the table, except that 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 the purpose of perception, that hand becomes real!

The human brain was shaped by the most rigorous, exhaustive research and development and product-testing process on our planet—evolution (and subsequently development and learning).

rest assured that evolution (and development and learning) doesn’t produce fragile systems, which is why changing the way you perceive is possible—because “fragile” isn’t at all the same thing as “malleable” and “adaptable.” Evolution’s “aim” is resilience, robustness and to be, well, evolvable.

So you didn’t evolve to see reality… you evolved to survive. And seeing reality accurately isn’t a prerequisite to survival. Indeed, it could even be a barrier to it. Without this as your founding premise about perception, you will be stuck in old ways of seeing, since if you attack a problem with the wrong assumption, there is nowhere to go but deeper into that assumption, whether you know you’re getting further from the truth or not.

The wonderfully epigrammatic Goethe nevertheless produced a memorable phrase that he likely used to console himself when his perception failed him: “The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.”

This reminds me of a well-known joke in science: Imagine a very dark street. In the distance is a single streetlight illuminating a small circle of the sidewalk (all other lights along the road are for some reason off). Within this circle of light is someone on their hands and knees. You walk up to them and ask them what they’re doing. They reply: “Looking for my keys.” Naturally you want to help as they seem really quite desperate. It’s late and cold and surely two people looking in the same space is better than one. So for reasons of efficiency—to help you guide your search—you ask: “By the way, where did you drop them?” The answer: “I dropped them way over there,” says the person, pointing to a place in the dark a hundred meters behind you. “Then why in the hell are you looking here?” you ask. “Because this is the only place I can see!”

It is critical to understand that the meaning of the thing is not the same as the thing itself. In other words, perception is similar to reading poetry: you are interpreting what it means, because it could mean anything.

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is one of Berkeley’s best-known works and in it he sets down his beliefs on perception.

what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we PERCEIVE BESIDES OUR OWN IDEAS OR SENSATIONS?”

Berkeley went further than neuroscience does and claimed that in fact nothing could have an “existence independent of and without the mind.”

Range isn’t the only aspect of light we don’t see in its full reality. There is also its quality or orientation, called polarization. All light is either polarized (the waves of vibrating energy charges occur on a single plane) or unpolarized (the vibrations occur on multiple planes). You and I don’t perceive polarity, even if you may own polarized sunglasses that help reduce glare by ensuring that only vertical waves, not reflected horizontal waves, come through.

another person is like any other physical object: namely, a source of inherently meaningless information.

Science is about getting to the source of physical phenomena, pushing past the information to arrive at understanding. Neuroscience specifically tries to understand how the brain gets past information… to meaning, which is what Dale Purves and I previously called the “empirical significance” of information. This is what the brain does, and this is why humans have survived and flourished. Our species has been so successful not in spite of our inability to see reality but because of it. We see our past ecology’s interpretation, and this helps our brain respond in a way that is behaviorally useful.

In the end, the meaninglessness of information doesn’t matter. It’s what we do that matters, since at the root of human existence is the question: What’s next? To answer that question well (or more accurately, better) is to survive, and our assumption—until now—was that we had to know reality in order to answer it. But we don’t. How else would we have survived for millennia? How have we built cities, societies, and skyscrapers? How have we created so much meaning out of the meaninglessness? Simple. Through the modus operandi of evolution, development, and learning that we carry inside us: trial and error. Which means we must engage with the world… empirically.

This is how we construct (and thus change) the architecture of our brains: through experimentation… by actively engaging with t...

it is critical to understand that there is always meaning everywhere in our perceptions; it is just not in the information we have immediately at hand. Rather, the ecological brain constructs meaning out of the only other piece of information it does have access to… past experience.

we have the ability to physically change our brain… not in spite of its inherently interpretive, reality-removed nature but because of it.

Ben’s brain found an answer to that essential question… What’s next?… because he cared to.

This is why trial and error, action and reaction (feedback)… namely, the “response cycle”… is at the center of perception. Engaging with the world gives our brain a historical record of experiential feedback that sculpts the neural architecture of the brain. That architecture, and the resulting perceptions that ensue, are our reality. In short, our brain is history and little else… a physical manifestation of your past (individually, culturally and evolutionarily) with the capacity to adapt to a new “future past.”

This means that the more you engage with your world, the richer your history of response will be for helping you respond usefully. This is another way of saying that it is not just important to be active, it is neurologically necessary. We are not outside observers of the world defined by our “essential properties.” Like the whirlpool, we are defined by our interactions; we are defined by our ecology. It is how our brains makes sense of the meaninglessness.

By physically changing your brain, you directly influence the types of perceptions you can have in the future. This is “cellular innovation”, which leads to innovation at the lived level of the things you think to do and the ideas you have.

Ten pairs of kittens were kept in darkness from birth, but after a few weeks Held and Hein began exposing them two at a time to light during three-hour sessions on a rotating carousel. Both kittens were connected to the same carousel, yet there was a key difference: one could otherwise move freely, while the other’s movements were restricted by a yoked gondola, or basket, inside which it had been placed and from which it could view the world. Whenever Kitten A, the mobile one, made a motion, this caused Kitten P, the immobile one, to move in response. As the sessions progressed, this setup gave the two kittens’ brains nearly the exact same visual past, along with a similar history of movements through space. The ways in which they engaged with their brave new world of seeing, however, were completely different.

The happy ending is that after 48 hours moving freely in an illuminated space, Kitten P was soon as proficient in its spatial perception and coordination as Kitten A, an outcome very similar to what happens to people after cataracts surgery. Its brain was able to quickly create the necessary enacted history it had previously been deprived of by the imposed limitations of the basket.

But the big-picture takeaways from the belt are more exciting than anything else, since they are an example of the applied viability of seeing differently. I don’t mean this in the futurist, transhumanist sense that fifty years from now we’ll all be wearing feelSpace belts and other body modifications that will make us proto-superhumans. I’m excited for what the feelSpace belt says about what you and I can do without the belt right now.

As König puts it, “Your brain is big enough that you can learn anything. You can learn sense six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. The only limitation is the time to train the senses. But in principle your capabilities aren’t limited.”

During their time wearing (and perceiving with) the feelSpace belt, people still didn’t have access to reality, but they easily adapted to a new way of making meaning. All they were doing was only what humans have always done: make sense of their senses.

Birds, dolphins, lions; we’re all just brains in bodies and bodies in the world with one goal and one goal only: to survive (and in the case of modern-day humans, flourish!). Here’s the thing: survival (and flourishing) requires innovation.

You and all your subsequent perceptions are a direct, physiological manifestation of your past perceptual meanings, and your past is largely your interaction with your environment, and thus your ecology. It is precisely because… and not in spite… of the fact that you don’t see reality that you are able to so fluidly adapt and change. Sit with this idea: Not seeing reality is essential to our ability to adapt.

Learning to deviate innovatively requires you to embrace the glorious mess of trial and error, and much of this engagement grows out of the obstacles of your surroundings. Every great artistic movement is precisely that… a movement, meaning a highly stimulating context replete with escalating challenges and uninhibited experimentation that pushes things ‘forward’. The same goes for technology.

The brain matches its environment, both for good and for bad. The cerebral cortex becomes more complex in an “enriched” environment—or less complex in an “impoverished” environment.

If you give your plastic human brain a dull, unchallenging context, it will adapt to the lack of challenge and let its dull side come out. After all, the brain cells are expensive, so this is a useful strategy to conserve energy. On the other hand, if you give the brain a complex context, it will respond to this complexity and adapt accordingly.

The brain doesn’t always want soft foam toys. It needs to learn that it can stand back up after having been knocked down, and in doing so become more resilient both immediately and in the long term.

The brain is an inescapably connective apparatus… the ultimate hypersocial system. As such, it deals in relationships. The brain doesn’t do absolutes. This is because meaning can’t be made in a vacuum.

Detecting differences (or contrast) is so integral to the functioning of our brains that when our senses are deprived of different relationships they can shut down. In other words, we need deviation.