In the 1970s, the psychologist Richard Gregory built on Helmholtz’s ideas in a different way, with his theory of perception as a kind of neural “hypothesis-testing.” According to Gregory, just as scientists test and update scientific hypotheses by obtaining data from experiments, the brain is continually formulating perceptual hypotheses about the way the world is—based on past experiences and other forms of stored information—and testing these hypotheses by acquiring data from the sensory organs. Perceptual content, for Gregory, is determined by the brain’s best-supported hypotheses.
