All this happened, more or less.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
January 31, 2023
You know how you might be walking down a New York City street, late at night with a friend, and they love it, they think it’s full of life and quirky people, but you think it is full of trash and are looking for the nearest subway entrance? The two of you were at the same place, at the same time, but lived two different realities.
Our brain does not see the world as it is, even if it feels that way. That would be an unwieldy and impossible task from an information processing perspective, there is just too much stuff going on out there to register it all. The brain just pulls a Spotify move and builds a useful picture of the world, predicting what it is likely to be in the near future through selective filtering informed by past experience. What you call reality is actually your “favorites” playlist with a few “recommendations” here and there.
Just like there is variability in people’s Spotify favorites, there is variability in their realities. Different past experiences is one cause. The other is the diversity of our physical bodies. The brain has no eyes or ears, it gets its intel second-hand, from the sensory systems of the body. The body has eyes, ears, noses for what comes in from the outside, and interoceptive receptors* for what comes from the inside (say, a tight chest or a fast heartbeat). There is individual variability in the hardware and variability in the software. It’s no surprise there is variability of realities.
Anil Seth speaks of reality as “controlled hallucination”:
Our experiences are the content that the brain predicts from the inside out, anticipating what is in the world, and the information from the senses ties us with what exists in the world in a way that’s useful for our organism.
The word “hallucination” sounds strong but it is justified when you contemplate specific examples, like colors. Colors do not exist in nature, we hallucinate them because it is useful for our survival. One wonders what else we hallucinate. Importantly, as Anil says, it is a controlled hallucination. There may be variability but it is usually not to the point where it decouples with what is out there, at least not for too long. That would be maladaptive**.
This variability in our realities is not a big deal if it is just a night in the city, but the same thing happens in how we experience other people and ourselves. It then becomes a big deal. It can be the source of misery or happiness. Awareness of this variability opens the door to understanding ourselves and others, building compassion through understanding, and ultimately making changes to our lives and our environment so that our reality can better cooperate with that of others.
Until now, this enlightened view could only be achieved through intentional contemplation, developing the soul, meditation, and other such rich but practically cumbersome ways***. Our WEIRD culture, with its over-literal understanding of science as “you can only believe what’s in front of your eyes”, has left us ill-equipped to appreciate the true wisdom of these practices. Most of us have no time or inclination for them since they run against these contemporary winds.
Given how data-driven our era is, it would be a lot easier if the diversity of our realities becomes a data-based fact we are all aware of, like we all know that the earth revolves around the sun, or have a rough sense of how weather works. Unfortunately, the data we have at this time is very limited. We do not know what that variability is, how big it is, what aspects of experience are more variable than others, how they correlate with each other, or how this affects people’s cognition, emotions, judgements and actions. This is finally starting to change.
Last summer, neuroscientist Anil Seth (University of Sussex) and philosopher Fiona Macpherson (University of Glasgow) launched the Perception Census, an interactive and engaging way to enlist the public into building the first large-scale database of the perceptual diversity among us. They say:
The Perception Census has the potential to rewrite our understanding of how we each experience a unique world, and to help society as a whole build new platforms for empathy and communication by embedding a recognition that the way we see things might not be the way they are, and that we all experience our shared reality in richly diverse ways. The Census will be an invaluable resource - providing us with a new map to this fascinating hidden landscape.
The Census has already collected data from tens of thousands of people on several different dimensions of perceptual experience. This is an essential starting point to build the science of experiential variation.
Neurodiverse people are especially aware of the gap between their experience of reality and the supposedly “normal” one. Except all of the above tells you that there is no normal experience. When I recently met with Anil, the first thing he said is ”there is no neurotypical, we are all different”, and ”I don’t like the term neurodiverse because, in practice, it reinforces the idea of the neurotypical”.
He is right about that. ADHD, for example, is better viewed as a commonality of realities shared among the ADHD people, rather than a difference from the imaginary “normal person” who, the implication is, “sees the world as it is”.
This view does not diminish the very real challenges of people of a particular flavors in our current society. It goes about solving them in a different way. It changes the way we pose the questions and may make easier the changes we want to see. The current cultural shifts, from disability to neurodiversity, from impairments to strengths/weaknesses, and from hierarchy to diversity in the workplace, are in the right direction but they still sound a lot like euphemisms. They leave the vast majority of ADHD having to fight the battles of being special. In private, they almost always oscillate between clarity that they are perfectly functioning human beings, and asking themselves the toxic question “is there something wrong with me?” To which there are no convincing answers because our very idea of reality is wrong.
No massaging of words will change this situation like a data-backed science shift can. We can then grapple with the real question: Are our current social technologies designed with the wrong idea, a fixed reality, build into them? How should we redesign them to fit the facts?
The Perception Census is also a big deal because it is a significant step towards ecological rather than lab data in psychology and neuroscience.
The goal of psychology and neuroscience is to understand human cognition and behavior in the real world. However, researchers typically conduct experiments in the lab. Not only that does not resemble the real world, it is often intentionally stripped of the real world. This raises questions about the answers the lab gives. It makes sense to study a fluid in the lab but how much can we learn about humans in such an artificial environment? This is the ‘real-world or the lab’-dilemma. To bridge the gap, there is a move towards what is called “ecological data”, gathered in the real world, where people live and behave in a context.
That is a good intention but leaves us with the question of how to gather that data. Many such attempts suffer from obviously bad user design. They are clunky apps that pop a message on your phone asking you a question, say, are you angry now? From a science perspective, such methods can introduce a different kind of bias (be reminder to be angry), and from a UX perspective it is hard to keep people engaged. People may just answer junk because your question landed on their phone at the wrong time.
The Census goes a long way towards a design that is engaging and multi-dimensional. It motivates people to participate through curiosity. It is beautifully designed. Still, it is an effort to keep people engaged past the first “level” and, as Anil said, “there is a trade off between what you can get out of people, and the data you would like to have”. Looking ahead, it is not hard to see that there will always be limitations to what scientists can gather through such means. If you want to keep the engagement, you will find yourself limited in what and how you ask, and if you ask directly you are in danger of introducing biases.
The obvious alternative is to build a proper channel and collaboration between academia and consumer-facing tech companies. The commercial sector is naturally gathering an enormous amount of data on people, together with a lot of its ecological context. There is a big debate of course about how they use that data, and the importance of privacy. But there is another, equally important, debate that we ought to be having: are we wasting data that is precious for science? Can we harness that data to increase the wealth of the commons through a better understanding of ourselves and the world?
* The Perception Census focuses on how we experience the external world. We should not forget that interoception, how we perceive our own body and its signals, is also hugely important. It may also affect how we perceive the outside. A nice reference is Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood, by Anil and Manos Tsakiris.
** Our visual system is thought to have evolved primarily to allow us to recognize colored fruit standing out against green leaves or possibly snakes, which were primary predators or early simians.These days, however, it is used far more often to decipher the complex symbolic representations that we use to represent language or to ‘‘read’’ other people’s facial expressions. ‘‘Social cognition’’—the ability to infer another person’s internal emotional state—depends upon the ability to interpret their facial expressions and tone of voice. If patients cannot accurately process faces because of early visual deficits, or process the pitch changes that allow one to interpret tone of voice as has been proposed previously, then trying to remediate social cognition as a construct becomes futile. It is axiomatic that if patients experience the world around them differently, they will react to it differently as well.
- Sensory Processing in Schizophrenia: Neither Simple nor Intact, Daniel C. Javitt
*** You can also get there by carefully following what the Dalai Lama teaches. He makes it clear that unhappiness is a result of a "confusion about the nature of reality", and the key concept of dependent arising is the same as what you find in emergence/dynamical systems and contextuality in category theory. But perhaps this is the hard way there and we can make a version that is more easily digestible?