Deviate, page 3
We are OK with speaking a different language than another person, but when my friends, loved ones, and others whose perception and grasp of reality I trust differ at such a fundamental level as color, this raises… for a beautiful moment, albeit too brief… deep, largely unconscious existential questions about how I see the world around me. It unnerved something at the core of how people understood their very consciousness, selves, and existence. As the actor and writer Mindy Kaling tweeted on February 25th, in the midst of the frenzy of #TheDress (one of her many impassioned tweets about it): “I think I’m getting so mad about the dress because it’s an assault on what I believe is objective truth.”
This is the crux about perception and self that The Dress brought up for so many: there is an objective “truth” or reality, but our brains don’t give us access to it. We got a shocking “look” at the cracks in our highly subjective reality through the photo of the dress—and it was a bit upsetting, or at least unsettling. The key for understanding how to enhance creativity through an understanding of perception… as you will soon see… is the following: this brief step into the most fundamental of uncertainties was also exciting for people. It freaked them out a bit yes, but it thrilled them, too.
For me personally, it was even more exciting, since I got to observe in real-time as millions of people took a dramatic step forward in understanding. Yet some people also wrote off The Dress: “OK, my perception didn’t see reality this time, but it usually does.” “No!” I wanted to shout. “You never, ever see reality!” Unfortunately, this essential point never became the central “story” of The Dress, though some in the scientific community took advantage of the opportunity to engage a broader audience with a topic that in any other cultural moment would have seemed abstruse and irrelevant. In May 2015, for example, Current Biology simultaneously published three studies of The Dress. One found that the distribution of colors of the dress corresponded to “natural daylights,” which makes it harder for your brain to differentiate sources of light from surfaces that reflect light (more on this in the next chapter). Another study made a discovery about how the brain processes the color blue, revealing that things have a greater probability of appearing white or gray to the human eye when “varied along bluish directions.” The last study, which surveyed 1,401 participants, found that 57 percent see the dress as blue/black, while the white/gold perception of the dress was more common in older people and women. Additionally, on a second viewing, participants’ perception sometimes switched white/gold to blue/back, or vice versa. In short, the viral photo proved to be an ideal experimental object to further the study of visual perception.3
Still, none of this answers the question of why the hell people saw that dress differently.
#TheDress tapped into not only how perception works, but why it matters so much to us. It illustrates the extremely counterintuitive nature of our brain. If we saw the world as it really is, then things that are the same should look the same. Likewise, things that are different should look different… always, to everyone. This seems sensible and correct, something we can count on from our perception (or so we thought). After all, seeing different intensities of light is the simplest task the visual brain performs, so simple that even some jellyfish can do it—and they don’t even have a brain.
Yet perceiving light is not actually as straightforward as it may seem, despite the fact that we do it every waking millisecond. The billions of cells and their interconnections devoted to it are evidence of its difficulty. We rely on this perceptual skill to make instinctive decisions that serve us as we move through the world. The Dress, however, revealed that just because we sense light, we don’t necessarily see the reality of it.
In the first of the images that follow, each circle is a different shade of gray. It’s easy to perceive the varying gradations. Things that are different should look different, and they do.
In the second image we are looking at two circles of identical shades of gray.
Now look at the third image. The gray circle on the left inside the dark box looks lighter than the gray circle on the right inside the white box. They appear to be two distinct shades of gray.
But they’re not. They are the exact same gray.
This is the objective reality—which is fundamentally different from our perceptional reality. What’s more, every reader of this book will perceive these three images the same way you did, with the same departure from the physical reality of what is printed on the page. What is more, it is not simply that dark surrounds make things look lighter than light surrounds. The opposite can also be true: light surrounds can make things look lighter and dark surrounds can make things look darker as shown in the fourth image, where the central regions, which look like circles obscured by four squares, appear differently light in the way just described.
But the most powerful message here is one that never came up during the viral Dress phenomenon. What is true for vision is indeed true for every one of our senses. What people realized about the subjectivity of their sight also goes for every other facet of their “reality”: there are illusions in sound, touch, taste, and smell, too.
A very well-known example of tactile “gaps” between perception and reality is called the “Rubber-Hand Illusion.” In this so-called trick, a person is seated at a table with one hand resting in front of them, while the other is out of sight behind a divider. A fake hand is set down in front of the person in place of the outof-sight hand, so they have what looks more or less like their two hands resting on the table, except that one of them isn’t theirs (which of course they’re aware of). Then the “experimenter” begins lightly brushing the fingers of the hidden real hand and the fake visible hand at the same time. Sure enough, the person immediately starts identifying with the fake hand as if it were theirs, feeling as if the brushing sensation is happening not behind the hidden divider, but on the fake hand they suddenly feel connected to. For the purpose of perception, that hand becomes real!
The Rubber-Hand Illusion is what’s called a body transfer, but our brain’s way of processing reality… rather than giving it to us directly… also opens us up to other slightly freaky “mix-ups” of the senses. Researchers have shown, for example, that we are capable of hearing “phantom words.” When listening to nonsense sounds, our brains pick out clear-seeming words that aren’t actually there in the audio. There is also the “Barber’s Shop Illusion,” in which a recording of snipping scissors gives the impression of the sound getting closer or farther depending on the volume rising or lowering, when the sound isn’t changing position at all. Or think of the common experience of sitting in a stationary car or plane, and when the car or plane next to you begins to move, at first you think you are the one in motion. There are many, many more phenomena like these.
One of the first people to pick up on what seemed a “kink” in visual perception was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the eighteenth-century man of letters we know today as the father of modern German literature. In his day he was famous (though also slightly infamous, as you’ll see) as an omnivorous dabbler across disciplines, as likely to throw his energies into osteology (the study of bones) as he was to immerse himself in botany. While literature was his first love, Goethe was above all else a man of passion, often described as being wild in nature, so much so that as a young man his friends referred to him as the “wolf ” and the “bear.”4 (In his college days in Leipzig, his out-of-fashion Frankfurt dress style also amused his peers.) But he was able to tame this wolfish unruliness into a high-society charisma as he became a literary celebrity in his twenties, the Duke Karl August soon appointing him to several state roles, including Director of the War Department. Goethe’s headstrong and even reckless hunger for new intellectual experiences returned in full force in the late 1780s when his “manysidedness,” as a biographer once labeled it, led him to study light and color.
Goethe had recently spent a very happy two years in Italy. There he had become acquainted with the German painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein while also exploring his own talents in the fine arts. He eventually accepted that he had none, but he returned to Germany with a reignited interest in the natural world artists sought to capture. “No one acquainted with the charm which the secrets of Nature have for man, will wonder that I have quitted the circle of observations in which I have hitherto been confined,” he wrote in an unpublished essay. “I stand in no fear of the reproach that it must be a spirit of contradiction which has drawn me from the contemplation and portraiture of the human heart to that of Nature. For it will be allowed that all things are intimately connected, and that the inquiring mind is unwilling to be excluded from anything attainable.”
This declaration led to one of history’s most legendary examples of a literary personage disastrously elbowing his way into the halls of science. Depending on who you ask, what transpired was either a rewardingly poetic misadventure into a realm the belletrist innocently misconstrued, or an arrogant and willfully wrongheaded foray into a field where he did not belong. In reality it was a mixture of the two—neither and both. Goethe’s passionate way of being wasn’t well suited to the cold-hard-facts approach of science, yet his writerly eye for the revelatory moment did play a key role in his scientific forays when he had his own moment, albeit a falsely revelatory one.5
Drawn to optics, Goethe had borrowed a prism to test Newton’s groundbreaking work that refracted white light into its constituent colors, a discovery that today would have likely won Newton a Nobel Prize.6 Executing the experiment incorrectly, and far from fully versed on the theory behind it, Goethe expected to beam the full spectrum of color on the wall of his home, only to beam nothing. The wall remained a white blank on which he could project his rapidly growing conviction: “Newton’s theory is false!”
Ardently sure that contemporary science was terribly off course in understanding light, he took leave of his diplomatic responsibilities to devote himself to physics. Scientists of the time ridiculed him while littérateurs and nobles cheered him on, certain that the wild wolf of a poet would dethrone Newton. The Duke of Gotha gave him a laboratory; a prince sent him new, better prisms from abroad. Then in 1792, while conducting his inquiry, Goethe noticed that a white light could produce shadows with colored hues. Likewise, colored lights changed hues depending on the “opaque,” or semi-transparent, medium they passed through. A yellow light could redden all the way to ruby through the opaque. This too appeared to violate Newton’s physical laws purporting to explain light, and the disconnect created a still deeper chasm in Goethe’s understanding of Newton’s theories that purported to explain reality. So he narrowed his focus to work out this problem and was sucked into a twenty-year obsession with color and perception.
In works like The Sorrows of Young Werther, the tumultuous story of a young man’s unrequited love, Goethe proved himself to be a poet of the human interior, so perhaps it’s no surprise that when it came to color he at first wasn’t always able to step outside the cave of his own perception to see that the disjuncture was inside. Like most of us, he took for granted that he saw reality; after all, his prodigious mind had allowed him to “see” human realities so clearly in his writing, not to mention that perception was well over a century away from growing from a concept into a locus of science. Soon enough, however, he gave up the idea that the seemingly mismatched hues were due to some physical quality of light that science had yet to explain. Instead, he gradually realized that the colored appearance of certain shadows was a result of human perception’s interaction with its environs—not a mystery of the world but a mystery of the mind.7 Yet he could only uselessly paw at the reasons behind this strange mystery inside his own brain, so he became a scrupulous recorder of every phenomenon of light he observed.
The subject of color consumed Goethe to the point that, in 1810, he published a massive tome on his investigations called Zur Farbenlehre, or Theory of Color. The “science” of the book has long since been dismissed, most notably his attacks on Newton. Goethe’s taxonomic opus did, on the other hand, incite intense philosophical discussion, leading Wittgenstein to pen Remarks on Color and Schopenhauer to write On Vision and Colors. Yet Goethe’s encyclopedic descriptions of color, like all his work, still make for lyrical, pleasing reading today: “These colors pass like a breath over the plate of steel; each seems to fly before the other, but, in reality, each successive hue is constantly developed from the preceding one.”8 His sense of wonder is an invaluable trait we can still learn from. And this obsession in Goethe’s life may explain the origins of the famous line from his masterpiece Faust, when Mephistopheles, a stand-in for the devil, says to the easily corruptible Student: “Grey is, young friend, all theory.”9
It is worth taking a moment to dwell on the word reality as Goethe used it at the time of writing Theory of Color, as the eighteenth century became the nineteenth. This was still the heyday of the Enlightenment, a revolutionary period in which Western societies were trading in the superstitions of the medieval age for a newly cemented belief in the rationality of man. If “man” was a being of capital-R Reason, then wouldn’t it have been a contradiction to suggest that the very sine qua non of reason—perception—prevented humans from seeing reality accurately? Humans were rapidly conquering their time and place with political theory, criminal law, and mathematical proofs, so how could the minds producing such important changes in reality not see reality itself ? At its core the story of Goethe’s glorious boondoggle with color says less about him (though it certainly does say a lot about him) than it does about the assumptions that reigned at a time when so much about the brain was still unknown—the very same assumptions about “seeing reality” that inflamed so many people online two centuries later with The Dress. Because when it comes to understanding perception, the correct assumption is deeply counterintuitive.
Most people assume we see the world accurately as it really is, even many neuroscientists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, because, well, why wouldn’t we? At first “glance,” it seems a wholly bad idea to see it in any other way. The seemingly logical premise that we see reality, however, doesn’t take into account a fundamental fact about ecology and how our minds actually operate therein, thus missing the essential truth that our brains didn’t evolve that way. But then what did our brains evolve to do? They evolved to survive—and that’s it.
A key nuance to understand is this: Despite the fact that your brain doesn’t perceive reality, your senses aren’t in any way “weak.” The human brain was shaped by the most rigorous, exhaustive research and development and product-testing process on our planet—evolution (and subsequently development and learning). As such, the test with the gray circles wasn’t meant to demonstrate how easy it is to play tricks on the senses. Quite the opposite (though we’ll wait until Chapter 4 to learn why the illusion you saw wasn’t actually an illusion). For now, just rest assured that evolution (and development and learning) doesn’t produce fragile systems, which is why changing the way you perceive is possible—because “fragile” isn’t at all the same thing as “malleable” and “adaptable.” Evolution’s “aim” is resilience, robustness and to be, well, evolvable. The human species is a superb example of this process at work. Which means when you look out into the world, you’re actually looking through millions of years of history.
So you didn’t evolve to see reality… you evolved to survive. And seeing reality accurately isn’t a prerequisite to survival. Indeed, it could even be a barrier to it. Without this as your founding premise about perception, you will be stuck in old ways of seeing, since if you attack a problem with the wrong assumption, there is nowhere to go but deeper into that assumption, whether you know you’re getting further from the truth or not.
There is so much in the stories of Goethe and The Dress that is at the heart of seeing differently: the ability to challenge the prevailing assumption (accidentally or otherwise) that constrains the brain’s search for the answer to the wrong place. Goethe became so frustrated, much like Mindy Kaling, because he took it for granted that his perception gave him direct access to reality, not that his brain was simply a very sophisticated interpreter. The wonderfully epigrammatic Goethe nevertheless produced a memorable phrase that he likely used to console himself when his perception failed him: “The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.” Perhaps this is true, but even the insight of knowing and admitting that you don’t know can be a challenge. This reminds me of a well-known joke in science:
Imagine a very dark street. In the distance is a single streetlight illuminating a small circle of the sidewalk (all other lights along the road are for some reason off). Within this circle of light is someone on their hands and knees. You walk up to them and ask them what they’re doing. They reply: “Looking for my keys.” Naturally you want to help as they seem really quite desperate. It’s late and cold and surely two people looking in the same space is better than one. So for reasons of efficiency—to help you guide your search—you ask: “By the way, where did you drop them?”
