THE TRUTH BEHIND PERCEPTION
Here’s a really freaky idea for you to chew on: you’ve never been outside your own head. (Okay, unless you believe in out of astral projection.) You— your brain, where your consciousness lives— have never seen a sunset, smelled a barbecue or listened to a good ballad. Your five sensory organs send electric impulses to your brain based on sensory input, and your brain interprets these impulses into images, smells, etc. And not always as reliably as you might think.
Your eyes, for instance, see everything upside down, out of focus and blotchy. Your mind attempts to reconcile these distorted images based on what it knows about reality. 3-D movies and stereograms take advantage of this by offering your mind false input, which it attempts to reconcile by adding dimension to a flat image.
Memory is another wickedly deceptive aspect of perception. Ever get in a really nasty argument over what a friend said or didn’t say in a conversation? Swear you remember every word, do you? The human mind, as wonderful as it is, doesn’t have the capacity to retain every detail of a situation, so it uses a kind of shorthand to record events and uses logic to fill in the blanks.
I saw an experiment on one of those Discovery Channel type shows. I wish I could credit the name of it. A man walks up to a college student and asks directions to wherever. While the student is giving directions, two men carrying furniture walk between them. While the student’s view is blocked, the man who asked directions switches places with one of the moving men. The student continues to give directions to this new person with no knowledge that a switch has been made!