Ummmm……..wow.That’s all I can say right now.
Originally shared by John Newman
New Theory of How the Brain Generates Our Perceptions of the World
This work describes how “perceptual bias” can alter our perceptions of objects in the world. For instance, when we see a blue bus, because we may expect to see a yellow bus we will actually see the blue bus bluer than it really is. They show that during the perception encoding processes of the brain, some perceptions are being decoded, altered and re-encoded to be experienced by other parts of the brain.
I also have an article called “Salience is the Sixth Sense” from earlier this year where I opine on this perceptual bias and how it combines with our raw perceptions, ultimately changing how we experience those perceptions: https://medium.com/science-and-its-communication/salience-is-the-sixth-sense-cba8c3b36bc
From the article,
Alan Stocker, an assistant professor in the psychology and the electrical and systems engineering departments, and Xue-Xin Wei, a psychology graduate student, combined these two concepts to create a new theory about how we perceive our world: How often we observe an object or scene shapes both what we expect of something similar in the future and how accurately we’ll see it.
“There are two forces that determine what we perceive,” Stocker said.
According to his research, those sometimes work against each other; we end up observing the opposite of what our experience tells us should happen. Keeping with the bus example, a bus that is actually blue would look even bluer than it is.
http://neurosciencenews.com/perception-bayesian-decoding-efficient-coding-2841/
The video from the article is linked below.
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