The article "Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?" by Andy Clark, in the New York Times, is not directly about Buddhism. But it touches on something that is very much about Buddhism. We like to think that our senses and brains are simply giving us an accurate scan of what's "out there," but neuroscience tells us it isn't that simple. In fact, Clark writes, our brains save "bandwidth" by making assumptions and predictions.
Without our realizing it, our brains and senses "fill in" data that isn't in the "scan" with data already stored in our heads. "What is marked and passed forward in the brain's flow of processing are the divergences from predicted states," Clark says.
Here's the part that I found most interesting:
"All this, if true, has much more than merely engineering significance. For it suggests that perception may best be seen as what has sometimes been described as a process of "controlled hallucination" (Ramesh Jain) in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to predict what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the predictions rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world. This in turn underlines the surprising extent to which the structure of our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) may quite literally be determining much of what we see, hear and feel."
This is so similar to what the Buddha taught about how we create our reality from mental projections. The "filled in" data, the unconscious expectations, are created mostly from our own past experience. So, from our earliest childhood, we are conditioned to perceive the world in a particular way. And we think these conditioned perceptions are "reality."
If this interests you, do read the whole article and watch the video of the "hollow face illusion." It's quite startling.
No comments:
Post a Comment