Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

by Beau Lotto

the trick here is to avoid confusing usefulness with accuracy. Your brain doesn’t record what was “right” for future reference.

Because for perception there is no such thing as accuracy.

for the brain, judging accuracy is in fact impossible.

The only way to know if your perception of the physical world is accurate is if you’re able to directly compare your perception to the underlying truth of reality. This is the way some artificial intelligence (AI) systems work. They are inherently “religious” because they need a godlike figure—the computer programmer—to tell them whether their outputs are correct or not, and then they incorporate this new information into future responses. But the human brain doesn’t function like this. We resemble “connectionist” AI systems that don’t have a godly programmer and thus never get information about the world directly. Instead, these systems modify and multiply their networks’ structures randomly. Those that change in a “useful” way survive and are therefore more likely to reproduce in the future.

Actions take on a meaning only by way of the meaning we give them… our response (internal or external).

Our brain’s way of seeing looks to this history—and only there—for what is useful, in the hopes of increasing the probability of surviving in the future.

Like color and everything else we experience in our awareness, pain takes place in the brain and absolutely nowhere else. There isn’t a sensation taking place inside your arm after your bone snaps, on your skin while your thumb bleeds, or around your eye as the area purples. Of course, it feels this way, but in fact this is nothing but an incredibly useful perceptual projection. The pain isn’t taking place anywhere but in your brain, by way of a complex neurophysiological process, although this doesn’t make the ex perience any less real. Your nociceptors, a special type of neuron or nerve ending, register damage and relay a message to your nervous system, which includes your brain. (Nociceptors aren’t distributed evenly around the body; fingertips and nipples and other areas that are particularly sensitive to touch have—by definition—significantly more nociceptors than other parts, like elbows.) In this sense, something objectively physiological does happen with pain, but it is the meaning of the cause we perceive, not the cause itself.

In terms of information flow, then, our eyes have very little to do with seeing. The seeing is done by our brain’s sophisticated network making sense of the visual sensory information. This is why the adage seeing is believing gets it all wrong:

Artists are fond of attributing the sometimes disorienting effects they create to “the fragility of our senses,” as London’s Tate Gallery described the work of Mark Titchner, a nominee for the 2006 Turner Prize. But this is rubbish, because our senses aren’t fragile. “Fragility” is a description of the feeling of perception in certain situations, especially ones engineered to disorient, but it is not an explanation.

In essence, living is nothing other than experiencing continual trial and error. Living is empirical.

None of our perceptions has a one-dimensional meaning. All our perceptions are multilayered meanings: red is a meaning, and a red apple is a meaning upon a meaning, and a ripe red apple is a meaning upon a meaning upon a meaning, and so on.

The key is this: the stories we imagine change us profoundly. Through imaging stories, we can create perceptions, and thus alter our future perceptual-based behaviors. This—arguably—is a point of consciousness, if not the point: to imagine experiences without the risk of enacting them. And not only in the now, but about events in the past. Which means, parallel to our trial-and-error, empirical physical engagement in the real world, we can use our brain to change our brain internally.

Not only do you not see reality—you see things that aren’t there.

If each time we do one of these embodied, low-risk thought experiments they are being encoded as if they were experiences, then we need to reconsider the big takeaway from the last chapter: Change your ecology and you change your brain.

You must learn to choose your delusions. If you don’t, they will choose you (remembering, of course, that not all delusions are choosable).

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. This applies to ways of seeing everything from current events to ourselves as we lean “skewedly” toward one interpretation, positive or negative. Things that are highly kurtotic, or skewed, are hard to shift away from. This is another way of saying that seeing differently isn’t just conceptually difficult—it’s statistically difficult.

What our brains carry forward with us into the future isn’t the actual past… definitely not an objective one. What your perceptual history of reality gives your brain are reflexive assumptions manifest in the functional architecture of the brain with which you perceive the here and now. These assumptions determine what we think and do, and help us to predict what to do next. It is important to note also the opposite: they also determine what we don’t think and do.

Are we products of nurture or nature? Do we come into the world with our personalities and physical constitutions already in place, or do our experiences and circumstances shape us? If we knew the answer to this question, the thinking goes, we could better address the ills in our societies. But it’s the wrong question, as the field of neural development has shown, in particular the field of epigenetics: It’s not one or the other. Nor is it a combination of both nurture and nature. Rather, it’s their constant interaction. Genes don’t encode specific traits as such; rather, they encode mechanisms, processes, and elements of interactions between cells and their cellular and non-cellular environment. Genetics and development are inherently ecological processes.

In a delightfully revealing experiment from 2010, David J. Kelly and Roberto Caldara discovered that people from Western societies exhibit different eye movements than people from Eastern societies. As they put it, “Culture affects the way people move their eyes to extract information in their visual world.” Asians extracted visual information more “holistically,” whereas westerners did so more “analytically” (there was no difference in their ability to recognize faces). Western cultures focus on discrete elements or “salient objects” with which they can confidently process information, as befits a markedly individualistic culture. Eastern cultures, on the other hand, put higher value on groups and collective goals, causing them to be drawn to a “region” rather than one specific feature of a face. In practice, this means that Asians focus more on the nose area on average, while westerners are drawn to eyes and mouths.

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.

The cells in your brain constitute the Cartesian You. By “Cartesian,” I’m referring to the French philosopher René Descartes, who espoused a mechanistic view of human consciousness, out of which came his famous phrase cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” Your thinking, and therefore your being, depends on the cells that constitute your brain’s railroad system, allowing the electrical patterns—like trains—to follow their reflex arcs.

our perceptions in practice aren’t infinite—far from it, in fact. They are a mere minuscule subset of what is objectively possible. Why? Because of our assumptions, which come from experience. These experience-driven biases define and limit the synaptic pathways through which our thoughts and behaviors come into being. Hence, the relationship between a stimulus (input) and its resulting neural pattern (output) that is a perception is constrained by the network architecture of your brain.

In short, your assumptions make you you. This means pretty much everything you perceive about your own conscious identity would be on the line if they were ever to be doubted. Yet the process of creating these brain-based biases that give you your “you-ness” also endows us with the unique people the world so badly needs (whom I’ll refer to as “deviators”).

your brain does not make big jumps.

Hence, even though there are an infinite number of things you could theoretically think, your past thinking and behavior… your assumptions or biases… make it more likely that you will go toward certain perceptions and away from others.

the first assumption that I’m trying to encode in your brain through reading this book is this: to admit that you have assumptions (or biases), every second of every day, in every act and perception. At any point in time, we are all only responding, reacting according to our assumptions about inherently uncertain information.

It’s important at this point when talking about biases and assumptions and their subjective roots, to mention that here we’re not talking about post-modern relativism, a type of thinking that gives equal validity to all things by the mere fact of their existence in a fragmented world. Not all perceptions—including those shaped by social history—generated by your brain are equally good. Some are better than others. If this weren’t the case, then evolution itself wouldn’t have evolved.

take antelopes, which carry the communal brain bias to respond to the visual behavior of the others: if one antelope sees a lion, they all effectively see the lion as if they are one distributed perceptual system.

what was once useful may no longer be useful.

Earlier we have seen that our brains didn’t evolve to see reality, since that would be impossible; and thus they brilliantly “make sense” out of the senseless. Now we have a physiological, brain-based explanation for why only certain perceptions are likely to occur (and why even fewer actually do). Here is where we hit the problem: If everything you do—indeed who you are—is grounded in your assumptions; and if your assumptions represent your personal, developmental, evolutionary, and cultural history of interacting with your external and internal environments (i.e., what I call your ecology); and if these assumptions produce reflexive responses over which you have little—if any—control in the moment, then how can you ever break out of this cycle and see differently?

Seeing differently—to deviate—begins with awareness… with seeing yourself see (but by no means ends there). It begins with knowing that some of those often invisible assumptions that maintained your survival in the past may no longer be useful. It begins with understanding that they may in fact be (or become) bad for you (and others), and if not changed would curtail living. To truly embody this is to empathize with what it is to be human… indeed, with what it is to be any living, perceptual system.

So how do we see differently? We change our future by changing our past.

Every story, every book, all narratives spoken, read, or enacted are about changing the past, about “re-meaning” past experiences, or more specifically, about changing the future past.

Only after the fact did the decision appear in their consciousness, masquerading as the cause of the movement. By implication, this means that decisions in the present don’t necessarily belong to conscious proactive intentions as such, but to the neural mechanics that determine automatic perceptual behavior. By extension, it suggests that free will doesn’t exist. If correct, Libet’s experiment would mean that humans are passive spectators to the ultimate virtual reality experience: their own lives.

So while we’re not able to consciously control the “present now,” we can influence our “future now.” How? By changing our future past, which raises a deep question about where free will—if we have it—might actually live. What do I mean? Libet’s experiments demonstrate that we have little… if any… free will over our responses to events in the present. But through the process of imagination (delusion), we do have the ability to change the meanings of past events, whether they occurred a second ago or, as in the case of some cultural memes, centuries ago. “Re-meaning,” or changing the meaning of past events, necessarily changes our “past” history of our experience of the world—not of course the events themselves, nor the sensory data arising from those events, but the statistical history upon which perception is predicated.

From the perspective of perception, exercising the free will to re-mean the past history of meanings (i.e., our narrative) changes our future history from that moment on… hence, our “future past.” And because future perceptions—just like the ones you’re experiencing now—will also be reflexive responses to their empirical history, changing our “future past” has the potential to change future perceptions (each, ironically, is generated without free will). Hence, almost every story we construct about ourselves in relation to the world, whether they are born out of consultation with a psychotherapist or from behavioral cognitive therapy or from reading a “pop-sci” book like this one, is an attempt to re-mean past experiences in order to change future reflexive behaviors individually and/or collectively.

HOW do we begin to change our future past in practice? Answer: By starting with a ...

The great Czech writer Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, is a perfect—and perfectly layered—example of just this. The central character is a young man named Ludvik who makes a joke that turns out to be the wrong one for communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a time in which “fun went over badly.”61 He writes a postcard to a girl he has a crush on, who he doesn’t feel appreciates him. It reads: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” She shares his subversive missive with the authorities and this horribly recasts his future, causing him to commit a cruel deed many years later. But at the book’s end, a matured Ludvik reflects on his past, arriving at a deterministic—and perhaps convenient—conclusion. He decides that the effect of the joke he made, as well a...

the subversive quality of Why? is to be found in the change that it has created throughout history, and in its active suppression by governments and institutions, religions, and—most ironically of all—educational systems. Hence, innovators begin the process of creating new perceptions—of changing their future past—by asking why not just of anything, but of what we assume to be true already… our assumptions.

Arguably, to question your deep assumptions, especially those that define you (or your relationships or society), is the most “dangerous” thing you can do, as it has the greatest potential to lead to transformation and destruction in “equal” measure.

Without the brain (and in the future, brains augmented with AI) to generalize usefulness across contexts—to effectively find wise metaphors that transcend a situation—information doesn’t serve us. Without knowing why, we can’t find laws (basic principles) that can be generalized… like the law of gravity, which applies not to any particular object but to all objects that have mass. Effects without an understanding of the causes behind them, on the other hand, are just bunches of data points floating in the ether, offering nothing useful by themselves.

Understanding reduces the complexity of data by collapsing the dimensionality of information to a lower set of known variables.

What you want is to organize the data set. But in principle there are a huge number of ways to do so. Should you organize it by type, color, surface quality, or a combination of one, two, or n variables? Which is the best (or “right”) way to organize it? The “right” answer is the one that offers the deepest understanding, and it turns out that in this example the answer is by size.

Understanding transcends context, since the different contexts collapse according to their previously unknown similarity, which the principle contains. That is what understanding does. And you actually feel it in your brain when it happens. Your “cognitive load” decreases, your level of stress and anxiety decrease, and your emotional state improves.

“Why?” provoked not only the Prague Spring but also the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The revolutionaries and everyday citizens who brought on these societal waves of change all shared the same question: Why are things this way and not another way? If you get enough people to ask themselves this, tremendous—and tremendously unpredictable—things suddenly become possible (without being able to define what those things may be a priori).

who, what, where, and when lead to answers that are lit by the metaphorical streetlamp illuminating the space that we can see (i.e., measure).

rather than “ideas worth spreading” we need to consider “questions worth asking.”

Good questions (most aren’t) reveal and build links in the same way the brain does in order to construct a reality… a past we use to perceive in the future… out of the objective one that we don’t have access to.

George Orwell was so wise when he wrote, “Every joke is a...

The process of “coming up with ideas” may feel like leaps, but thousands of minute, sequential processes actually take place.