God Soul Mind Brain

topsy-turvy in its colors—an apple with the same wavelengths reflecting from it might look sickly yellow.

    Wavelength is the real stuff out there in the world, a physical property of light. Color is a construction of the brain. Yet you perceive the redness as though it were a genuine property of the apple. The color looks like it is in physical space, painted onto the skin of that fruit. Your visual brain has created a model, and the model welds together the information of redness, apple, and “out there at that location.”

    Why would your perceptual system trick you, creating an essentially false construct? The reason is simply put. The purpose of perception is not to provide you with an accurate picture of the world. The purpose is to be useful to you. Whatever is advantageous—that is what the brain computes. To know the exact mixture of wavelengths bouncing off the apple—that is not useful. It changes with every passing cloud that alters the ambient light. But to know how the apple is different from the surround—that is useful. Color is useful but neither accurate nor real.

    I want to emphasize three general points about perception.

    First, it is a process of constructing a model in your brain of an object in the real world.

    Second, the model in your brain is typically not faithful to the actual object. It is simplified. It is altered. Some attributes of the model (such as the location of the object or the size of the object) may be closely related to the real world, and some (such as color) may be largely invented.

    Third, the attributes don’t feel like inventions in your mind. They feel like real properties that are spatially bound to the object. You do not perceive them as inner theories but as objective reality.

    The uncanny truth is that you do not experience the real world at all. You experience a simulated universe populated by models of objects. Even the experiences we think of as quintessential reality—the solidity of a tabletop, the hard feel of it against a palm, the sound as we rap on it—are examples of perception, reconstruction, a bundle of information inside the brain. You can deduce properties of the real thing and know them intellectually—chemical properties, scientific properties—but you cannot experience the world as it actually is. The very definition of experience is to construct a simplified model that is a proxy for the real thing.

    The science of perception is almost like transcendental philosophy.

    Social perception has come under study more recently than visual perception and is less well understood. The same general principles, however, seem to apply. The brain constructs simplified models of other people’s minds. The models are built by an interaction between the sensory information that flows in from the outside and an active perceptual and cognitive manipulation. We perceive these mind-models as though they were real things arrayed around us, located inside this and that person.

Social perception

    Recently I had an unpleasant encounter with an angry man on the street. I am a little embarrassed to write about it, but here goes. He was counting change in his hand for the parking meter while hurrying toward his car to avoid the parking police. At the same time, he was talking on his cell phone. Actually, he was yelling into his cell phone about some kind of investment. He wasn’t watching where he was going, and walked right into me. His change flew out of his hand and scattered all over the sidewalk. He took the cell phone away from his ear and pretty much let loose at me, screaming, his face going red in fury, spit flying out of his mouth, his fist clenched as if he were about to punch me. I didn’t say anything. I thought it was better not to argue, and too risky to help him pick up his change, so I walked away. Angry people always put me on edge, but as I sat in my office later that day, I tried to extract something useful out of the ridiculous encounter. I thought about it in the context of social perception.

    During that encounter I seemed to perceive his anger directly and instantaneously, as if it were a tangible thing, as if it were a heat pulsing out of him at me. Now that is social perception. Just as I perceive color as a real thing, physically bound to an object, I perceived anger as a real thing physically emanating from that man. My social machinery had constructed a perceptual model that included a mental attribute bound to an object