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Matthew Hutson – August 25, 2021

Three new books lay bare the weirdness of how our brains process the world around us.

Eventually, vision scientists figured out what was happening. It wasn’t our computer screens or our eyes. It was the mental calculations that brains make when we see. Some people unconsciously inferred that the dress was in direct light and mentally subtracted yellow from the image, so they saw blue and black stripes. Others saw it as being in shadow, where bluish light dominates. Their brains mentally subtracted blue from the image, and came up with a white and gold dress. 

Not only does thinking filter reality; it constructs it, inferring an outside world from ambiguous input. In Being You, Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, relates his explanation for how the “inner universe of subjective experience relates to, and can be explained in terms of, biological and physical processes unfolding in brains and bodies.” He contends that “experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body.” 

Prediction has come into vogue in academic circles in recent years. Seth and the philosopher Andy Clark, a colleague at Sussex, refer to predictions made by the brain as “controlled hallucinations.” The idea is that the brain is always constructing models of the world to explain and predict incoming information; it updates these models when prediction and the experience we get from our sensory inputs diverge. 

“Chairs aren’t red,” Seth writes, “just as they aren’t ugly or old-fashioned or avant-garde … When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends both on properties of the chair and on properties of my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about the ways in which a specific kind of surface reflects light.” 

Seth is not particularly interested in redness, or even in color more generally. Rather his larger claim is that this same process applies to all of perception: “The entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, of controlled hallucinations. You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.”

Cognitive scientists often rely on atypical examples to gain understanding of what’s really happening. Seth takes the reader through a fun litany of optical illusions and demonstrations, some quite familiar and others less so. Squares that are in fact the same shade appear to be different; spirals printed on paper appear to spontaneously rotate; an obscure image turns out to be a woman kissing a horse; a face shows up in a bathroom sink. Re-creating the mind’s psychedelic powers in silicon, an artificial-intelligence-powered virtual-reality setup that he and his colleagues created produces a Hunter Thompson–esque menagerie of animal parts emerging piecemeal from other objects in a square on the Sussex University campus. This series of examples, in Seth’s telling, “chips away at the beguiling but unhelpful intuition that consciousness is one thing—one big scary mystery in search of one big scary solution.” Seth’s perspective might be unsettling to those who prefer to believe that things are as they seem to be: “Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception.” 

Seth is on comparatively solid ground when he describes how the brain shapes experience, what philosophers call the “easy” problems of consciousness. They’re easy only in comparison to the “hard” problem: why subjective experience exists at all as a feature of the universe. Here he treads awkwardly, introducing the “real” problem, which is to “explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.” It’s not clear how the real problem differs from the easy problems, but somehow, he says, tackling it will get us some way toward resolving the hard problem. Now that would be a neat trick.

Where Seth relates, for the most part, the experiences of people with typical brains wrestling with atypical stimuli, in Coming to Our Senses, Susan Barry, an emeritus professor of neurobiology at Mount Holyoke college, tells the stories of two people who acquired new senses later in life than is usual. Liam McCoy, who had been nearly blind since he was an infant, was able to see almost clearly after a series of operations when he was 15 years old. Zohra Damji was profoundly deaf until she was given a cochlear implant at the unusually late age of 12. As Barry explains, Damji’s surgeon “told her aunt that, had he known the length and degree of Zohra’s deafness, he would not have performed the operation.” Barry’s compassionate, nuanced, and observant exposition is informed by her own experience:

At age forty-eight, I experienced a dramatic improvement in my vision, a change that repeatedly brought me moments of childlike glee. Cross-eyed from early infancy, I had seen the world primarily through one eye. Then, in mid-life, I learned, through a program of vision therapy, to use my eyes together. With each glance, everything I saw took on a new look. I could see the volume and 3D shape of the empty space between things. Tree branches reached out toward me; light fixtures floated. A visit to the produce section of the supermarket, with all its colors and 3D shapes, could send me into a sort of ecstasy. 

Barry was overwhelmed with joy at her new capacities, which she describes as “seeing in a new way.” She takes pains to point out how different this is from “seeing for the first time.” A person who has grown up with eyesight can grasp a scene in a single glance. “But where we perceive a three-dimensional landscape full of objects and people, a newly sighted adult sees a hodgepodge of lines and patches of colors appearing on one flat plane.” As McCoy described his experience of walking up and down stairs to Barry: 

The upstairs are large alternating bars of light and dark and the downstairs are a series of small lines. My main focus is to balance and step IN BETWEEN lines, never on one … Of course going downstairs you step in between every line but upstairs you skip every other bar. All the while, when I move, the stairs are skewing and changing.

Even a sidewalk was tricky, at first, to navigate. He had to judge whether a line “indicated the junction between flat sidewalk blocks, a crack in the cement, the outline of a stick, a shadow cast by an upright pole, or the presence of a sidewalk step,” Barry explains. “Should he step up, down, or over the line, or should he ignore it entirely?” As McCoy says, the complexity of his perceptual confusion probably cannot be fully explained in terms that sighted people are used to.

The same, of course, is true of hearing. Raw audio can be hard to untangle. Barry describes her own ability to listen to the radio while working, effortlessly distinguishing the background sounds in the room from her own typing and from the flute and violin music coming over the radio. “Like object recognition, sound recognition depends upon communication between lower and higher sensory areas in the brain … This neural attention to frequency helps with sound source recognition. Drop a spoon on a tiled kitchen floor, and you know immediately whether the spoon is metal or wood by the high- or low-frequency sound waves it produces upon impact.” Most people acquire such capacities in infancy. Damji didn’t. She would often ask others what she was hearing, but had an easier time learning to distinguish sounds that she made herself. She was surprised by how noisy eating potato chips was, telling Barry: “To me, potato chips were always such a delicate thing, the way they were so lightweight, and so fragile that you could break them easily, and I expected them to be soft-sounding. But the amount of noise they make when you crunch them was something out of place. So loud.” 

As Barry recounts, at first Damji was frightened by all sounds, “because they were meaningless.” But as she grew accustomed to her new capabilities, Damji found that “a sound is not a noise anymore but more like a story or an event.” The sound of laughter came to her as a complete surprise, and she told Barry it was her favorite. As Barry writes, “Although we may be hardly conscious of background sounds, we are also dependent upon them for our emotional well-being.” One strength of the book is in the depth of her connection with both McCoy and Damji. She spent years speaking with them and corresponding as they progressed through their careers: McCoy is now an ophthalmology researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, while Damji is a doctor. From the details of how they learned to see and hear, Barry concludes, convincingly, that “since the world and everything in it is constantly changing, it’s surprising that we can recognize anything at all.”

In What Makes Us Smart, Samuel Gershman, a psychology professor at Harvard, says that there are “two fundamental principles governing the organization of human intelligence.” Gershman’s book is not particularly accessible; it lacks connective tissue and is peppered with equations that are incompletely explained. He writes that intelligence is governed by “inductive bias,” meaning we prefer certain hypotheses before making observations, and “approximation bias,” which means we take mental shortcuts when faced with limited resources. Gershman uses these ideas to explain everything from visual illusions to conspiracy theories to the development of language, asserting that what looks dumb is often “smart.”

“The brain is evolution’s solution to the twin problems of limited data and limited computation,” he writes. 

He portrays the mind as a raucous committee of modules that somehow helps us fumble our way through the day. “Our mind consists of multiple systems for learning and decision making that only exchange limited amounts of information with one another,” he writes. If he’s correct, it’s impossible for even the most introspective and insightful among us to fully grasp what’s going  on inside our own head. As Damji wrote in a letter to Barry: 

When I had no choice but to learn Swahili in medical school in order to be able to talk to the patients—that is when I realized how much potential we have—especially when we are pushed out of our comfort zone. The brain learns it somehow.

Matthew Hutson is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a freelance science and tech writer.

This story was part of our September 2021 issue