Spirituality and Science - PART 3

Recent Advances in Cognitive Science

In last few decades many secrets about human perceptions and cognition are unveiled. The scientific studies about human perceptions (senses like eyes, ears, touch etc) in neurobiological and neurocomputational point of view have shown, that perceiving is not a simple process as we think. It is a much complex process. It involves active construction. To understand this, let's take a few examples about our vision. Scientist have studied lot of phenomenons where our process of seeing creates some faulty perceptions. These phenomenons help us to understand, how visual perception happens, what process or rules it follows etc. These phenomenons are called visual illusions. Lets see few of them -

In adjacent figure, you can see that long oblique lines are not parallel. But if we measure using scale, then they are actually parallel to each other. The reason behind this unparalleled perception is, our brain attempts to interpret small cross lines in third dimension, to create perception of depth. And as a byproduct of that processing it creates this distortion.

 Now look at the left figure. Can you  see red oval spots in left part of figure and pink oval spots in right part ? Actually they are exactly same in color. But our brain interprets it in a different way because of different backgrounds. And our perceptions change.

So, by now you must have got an idea about what our sensory perceptions (experiences) are in reality. They are actually things constructed by our brain ! Let's see few more...

In this adjacent figure you can see two images. The balls in lower image are lifted above ground, while in upper image they are touching the ground. However we can also clearly see that in both images the position of the balls is exactly same, except position of shadows' is changed. Thus our brain manipulates information available in two dimensions and interprets it in such a way that we get perception of third dimension also ! The 3D perception is well studied. Our brain is very efficient in constructing 3rd dimension from 2D. That's why we can see depth and height in still pictures, or movies. 

Not only shapes, color and dimensions, but perception of motion, speed also are constructed experiences of our mind. For example, the figures on left side show two kinds of motions. One is radial and another is rightward motion. In both images the strips are moving with equal physical speed.

However, most of the observers feel that radial motion is faster. 

We know about colorblindness, but there is similar disorder called motion blindness, in which subject can not perceive moving objects. They see the world as set of still images.  Thus, from these examples we know that motion and its speed  are   constructed feelings by our brain by fusing different images.

As the perception of motion, so is of time. It is also well studied using some interesting experiments. Its is a common experience in our lives that, waiting for something desperately just for 10 minutes seems to be much longer than enjoying 1 hour of party with friends. Time is also found to be a construct of our brain !

Continued in next blog....