“You shouldn’t believe everything. What you see isn’t always right.”
-Takehito Koyasu
Everything that enters the senses needs to be interpreted through the brain – and these interpretations occasionally go wrong. Neuroscience research tells us that we only ever see what proved useful to see in the past. Illusions are a simple but powerful example of this point. Like all our perceptions, we see illusions because the brain evolved not to see the retinal image, but to resolve the inherent “meaninglessness” of that image by continually redefining normality, a normality that is necessarily grounded in relationships, history and ecology.
Which is why we innately find regularities in information and reflexively imbue those regularities with value. But it is the value, not the information itself we see.
So, tomorrow morning when you open your eyes and look “out into” the world, don’t be fooled. You’re in fact looking in. You’re not seeing the world; you’re seeing a world … an internal map of value-relations derived from interactions within a particular, narrow context.
Another essential point about illusions implied in my TED talk is that they reveal our amazing capacity to entertain mutually exclusive internal realities simultaneously.