Human perception – what’s your reality?

This Boing Boing video got me thinking about my psychology studies, and just what a fascinating thing perception is. People with synesthesia involuntarily associate colours with objects, days, letters and numbers, but they’re just perceiving things in a slightly different way from everyone else, which is no less amazing.

When I got excited about perception was when I came to appreciate that, when you look at something, that image isn’t just being played to you like a video – your mind processes everything you see, runs it up against your memories, your library of experience, and even against simple geometric icons, all to present a picture of the world that makes sense.

Babies are effectively blind for a short while after they’re born – partly as their eyes are still developing, but mainly because nothing makes sense – it’s all meaningless lines, circles, squares and colours. The first time a baby smiles at its mother is probably because the baby just realised ‘hey, you’re the cool thing that cuddles me and gives me milk’. You see bunny rabbits in clouds because your brain is trying to interpret everything you see. You find someone attractive because their nose, their eyes or their lips resemble someone familiar. The way you see things is inextricably linked to what you’ve seen before, to who you are.

So give yourself a pat on the back, because your brain is really quite clever.