Storytelling Brain-I

Understanding Brain-Constructed ‘Reality’

What we call perception is actually subjective-assumptions,which rapidly changes and fills our mind with multiplied combinations arised of it.

These assumptions are mostly fed by subconscious prejudices; past experiences, social concepts that are imposed to us without being aware of imposition,and etc. What triggers these assumptions is feeling emotionally vulnerable and being under the control of the ego. These sociopsychological-based assumptions keep us away from reaching happiness but also restrict the limits of our understanding of the possibilities in life. For elaborate discussion, you are welcomed to access another story of mine.

The possible scenarios shaping in our mind and the one we call ‘reality’ from our point of view is generally misunderstanding or misperception. However, since the action is already taken in which we make predictions , it is easier to decide the truth and whether you misunderstood. In this case, the subjective creation of reality can easily be distinguished from the real one.

What if the brain-constructed reality is far from being ‘real’ but hard to distinguish? Well, it is another story.

“Evolution shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive but part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. -And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.”

Professor Donald Hoffman, cognitive scientist

There are scientifically revealed incapibilities of human perception such as perceiving UV lights,radiation,some specific colors ,certain frequences and etc.

Ilustration of how the sound waves are transferred to the brain

These are the surrounding information that brain receives but doesn’t process. For example, humans can’t hear excessively loud or excessively low tones. Moreover, the frequency range are able to hear (20–20.000 Hz) changes and hearing gets difficult in proportion to getting old. Why we can only hear the sounds between 20–20.000 Hz is because the receptors in our ears are capable to detect this frequency range so that only the frequencies between this range ‘means’ to the sensory receptors in our ears so that can be interpreted by the brain. Why some animals sense earthquakes is because they can hear wider frequencies.

What Michael Blanpied,associate coordinator of the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program, says that animals detect the first of an earthquake’s seismic waves which makes them snapping to attention, behaving strange and acting confused.

So, it is widely accepted that what we perceive is just a little of objective reality,i.e., reality as it is, surrounding us. The more we understand the environment due to technological improvements, the more we face that fact.

However, these are the incapabilites of human perception that can be explained by evolutionary adaptations.

The things get strange when our perception fools us about the things we are capable to ‘perceive’ biologically.

External sensory receptors perceive the information from the surrounding in the forms of light, sound, smell, color, etc. There are also internal receptors in our body that controls internal regulation such as the change in the blood pH or body temperature. These signals are transmitted to nerve cells and transformed into impulses. The brain reads these electrical pulses to construct the ‘reality’. However, while constructing so-called reality it fools us into two ways of controlled illusions:

1. It makes us ‘see’ things that are not actually there
2. It hinder us ‘see’ things that are actually there

‘Perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals.’

-Anil Seth, a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex

Let’s share an example from Will Stoor’s book which is called ‘The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better’:

Sometimes we may think ‘we saw a strange guy over there’ with a top hat and a cane loitering by a gate, but what we see is just a tree stump and bramble.

We see the tree stump and bramble and our brain makes a prediction about it, so put a guy over there but when we use our senses to check again, the brain changes the story as a more accurate prediction. By the words of Stoor: ‘your hallucination is updated’.

Indeed, the sensory information that the brain receives doesn’t change. Instead, the brain’s ‘guess’ changes with the contribution of fact-checking-senses. It is the same when we are dreaming: our brains fool us into believing what we are experiencing is real, the people we see, the smells, the feeling of touch, and every other thing: they are made of ‘same hallucinated neural models’. The difference is, fact-checking senses are: off. Since the brain has to make sense of these chaotic bursts of neural activity, it creates a cause-effect story.

The process works similarly for the people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and seeing hallcuniations. A smell, an object, a place, a sentence, or even just a ‘word’ which is associated with experienced-trauma may trigger hallucinations, or bout. What he/she sees as an hallucination is actually reality twisted by the brain. The brain receives the sensory signals and creates a story in which the gaps are filled with past-experiences.Brain’s best guess about reality results in hallucinations: uncontrolled perception.

An influential article Steel, C. (2015) enlightenes that it was already stated by Freud in 1936 that the phenomenon of hallucinations was a product of forgotten or repressed traumatic memories entering the conscious mind.

Morrison et al. (2002) interviewed 35 people who were experiencing hallucinations and/or delusions and receiving cognitive therapy and reported that 74.3% were able to identify an image in relation to their psychoticsymptoms and, of those, 70.8% (n=17) made an precise bond between the image and a particular event in their past.

Examples include an individual who had been raped and sexually abused as a child, reporting an intrusive image of a bearded man shouting.

Prejudices, subconscious traumas or places, smells, feels, impressions associated with our past-experiences are coded in our brains to be used later in the interpretations of reality.

Anil Seth influentially expresses this brain constructed reality relation as ‘The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.’

The second trick of brain-constructed reality:

Presumably, you heard about the 25th square frame effect. There are some ‘messages’, illustrations, or sounds in the movies or advertisements which are placed for the purpose of ‘imposing’ these messages into our subconscious mind. These messages are also called subliminal images. Mostly we see these images for very small seconds, hard to consciously recognize.

Beyond being exposed to subliminal images in the movies for split-seconds, the brain even fools us when the reality is directly in front of us!

Will Stoor shares a test in his book, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better, of a simulated vehicle stop that 58 percent of police trainees and 33 percent of experienced officiers, “failed to notice a gun positioned in full view on the passenger dashboard.”

In reality, there is a gun positioned in the dashboard, but for the 33 percent of officiers there is not. Anil Seth says that when we agree about our hallucinations,we call it ‘reality.’

By an evolutionary perspective, “Our brains warp our perception of world to make it easier to undertsand.”

So, how can we trust this brain-constructed reality when it is that much successful in twisting the facts?

Brain-constructed reality and perception is a highly contradicted and profound concept that is primarily in the research field of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Therefore, what I am being shared is not even the trailer of this subject. I will try to share more books, articles, and influential Ted-Talks in my later stories about it,

Keep reading and enjoy if you are interested in cognitive neuroscience and psychology!

Sources:

• http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/Hoffman-Stevens-Handbook.pdf
• Imagery and psychotic symptoms: a preliminary investigation. (2002, September 1). ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005796701001280
• Pujol, R. (2016, August 10). Auditory Brain. Http://Www.Cochlea.Org/. http://www.cochlea.org/en/hearing/auditory-brain#:%7E:text=The%20auditory%20brain%20receives%20the,is%20vital%20for%20future%20percepts!
• Resnick, B. (2020, June 22). The neuroscience of optical illusions, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/20978285/optical-illusion-science-humility-reality-polarization
• Steel, C. (2015). Hallucinations as a trauma-based memory: implications for psychological interventions. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1262.
• Storr, W. (2020b). The Science of Storytelling. Amsterdam University Press.
• W. (2020c, March 7). How, Exactly, Do Our Brains Construct Reality? Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/how-exactly-do-our-brains-construct-reality/
• Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil Seth. (2017, July 18). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo&ab_channel=TED