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Here's a thought experiment: Imagine there's a box in front of both of us. I ask you what's this thing in front of us. You say it's a box. And we both agree on the assigned label and we presume to have consensus. But, for all I know, you could be confirming to me verbally that the object is a box and still, unbeknownst to me, actually secretly perceive it as a round object in your personal mental model of the world. Not that you'd be lying. Just that the point where your truth meets mine might be a phantasm. There's really no way for me of knowing what you are thinking unless I make a breakthrough in telepathy. Of course, I could have you draw your mental idea of a box and then compare it with mine. But that still wouldn't satisfy me that we share a reality. For all I know, it's possible we might be in a paradigm where I perceive your drawing as a 'box' because of some confirmation bias.
Point is, perception is highly variable.
And I'm not even talking about things like “opinion” or “subjectivity”. I just mean, there seem to be simpler and more complex ways of perceiving reality. And how sophisticated our perception is depends on which aspects of reality we are concerned with. Among the species of the earth, organisms have evidently evolved to perceive the world according to what aids their survival. Evidence of this can be seen right at home, with us human beings.
As human beings, our range of perception excludes the nanoscale and macroscale, and we perceive only “medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds”, as biologist Richard Dawkins puts it in conversation with physicist-cum-philosopher Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
For instance, your sense-organs can't (as of today) help you perceive the electrons coursing through the silicon chip of your iPhone; nor can you see (I presume) some distant planet on the extremities of our solar system. One is too small/near, the other is too huge/far. But we can see our bed, because its scale and size is 'just right'. This limited range of perception, scientists posit convincingly, is because our hunter-gatherer ancestors, from whom we inherited our genetic programming, were more preoccupied by the more medium-sized objects like oncoming ferocious sabre-tooths or juicy roastable sabre-tooths. It makes perfect sense for machines like our brain to limit the scope of their awareness to the radius of our immediate concerns.
So, in a way, over time, we, as evolutionary organisms, have developed brains that understand only what we need to function in the world. And that means our tools of sensory perception are cultivated and specialised according to our domain of operation. We're perception specialists. And specialists can only ever handle a narrow dimension. But here's the good news: this doesn't have to limit our ability to put our existing tools of perception to much better use and produce a much more lucid mental model of our reality.
> Synaesthesiatakes you deeper
Tyson speaks of abandoning our senses because of their deceptiveness and limitedness, and relying on infallible mathematics and technological tools of perception — like microscopes, telescopes, gravitational-wave-detectors etc. — to help us understand the world better. Perfectly true, I feel. But I also feel we still have not tapped the full extent of our organic tools of perception.
Synaesthesia is about the interaction between domains of your brain that hitherto worked in isolation. It's collaborative, integrative, interactive.
There are, among us earthlings, anomalous species that have different — and, in some cases, more wholesome — experiences of perceiving reality. Take bats, for instance. Ever wonder how it may feel to 'see' the world in sound? Or dogs, who identify objects, people, and contexts through smell? Or snakes, who do the same through taste? Even among humans, synaesthetes perceive at a deeper level to the average person — seeing sounds, smelling ideas, colouring mental concepts. >Researchers at Sussex University hold that “Synaesthesia is a neat way to study differences in perception”.
We may not know it, but I think technically we're all natural synaesthetes, to some degree. Well, varying degrees. In fact, at any given moment, we are absorbing a bunch of different types of stimuli and probably forming hybrid memories and interconnected mental concepts as a result. For example, I get reminded of Chris Gayle when I think of something pink, something frothy, or something velvety and soft. Why in the world, you ask?
See, I developed this memory during the Indian cricket team's tour of West Indies in 2007 or thereabouts, when it was evening ritual to plonk myself on the spongy couch in front of the TV with a nice glass of strawberry milkshake in my palms, froth coating and cascading down the inner walls of the glass. And because all these sensory inputs were intermingled with highlights of Gayle's innings, my brain seems to have happily combined them into a Chris Gayle cocktail. In effect, softness ( ironic, given Gayle's ruggedness ), frothiness ( ew ), and pinkness ( hey, at least the West Indian cricket uniform is maroonpink ) became properties of my abstract concept of Chris Gayle.
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>Synaesthesia is about the interaction between domains of your brain that hitherto worked in isolation. It's collaborative, integrative, interactive. It seems to fortify or strengthen a perception by combining more layers of sensory input in its formation. Like an artist fully recreates a face by accreting dabs of paint of varied shades to define each contour. Like an investor reaches a sound decision on which stock to buy after gathering inputs and inputs from multiple expert market sources. Like you find a joke hilarious because you've processed the punchline simultaneously in two different dimensions of perception — the literal, and the ticklish nonsensical — and, therefore, the double-entendre shocks you into laughter.
Bisociation and creativity
Creativity has a lot to do with this kind of simultaneous multi-dimensional perception. Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler coined the god-awesome term “bisociation” in his 1964 book The Act of Creation . He explains humour as a “conflict of synergies” that is elucidated by this diagram below:
“The pattern underlying [the creative act] is the perceiving of a situation or idea, L, in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference, M1 and M2. The event L, in which the two intersect, is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths, as it were. While this unusual situation lasts, L is not merely linked to one associative context, but bisociated with two.
The procedure to be followed is this: first, determine the nature of M1 and M2 . . . by discovering the type of logic, the rules of the game, which govern each matrix. Often these rules are implied, as hidden axioms, and taken for granted — the code must be de-coded. The rest is easy: find the ‘link’ — the focal concept, word, or situation which is bisociated with both mental planes; lastly, define the character of the emotive charge and make a guess regarding the unconscious elements that it may contain.
In his book >A Southern Music: The Karnatic Story , Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna speaks of the spark of creativity that emanates at the confluence of two familiar melodic phrases when the two are soldered together by an unexpected “bridge”. So, basically, you'd have to be simultaneously aware of both phrases — juxtapose them — to get the musical surprise there.
The combinatorial strategy
Another well-documented tool of information-processing and storage is Mnemonics — a mental tool that help us remember things more easily. Mnemonics employs a similar mechanism to synaesthesia. It works on the same principle of interconnecting concepts and associating new objects with preexisting memories.
Any higher level of perception and information-processing seems to require a combinatorial strategy. Given that our perception is limited by the bandwidth of our senses, it becomes all the more useful — if not imperative — that we make efforts to increase interaction between the brain's domains and sensory inputs to produce a more cohesive and comprehensive view of the world.
You find a joke hilarious because you've processed the punchline simultaneously in two different dimensions of perception — the literal, and the ticklish nonsensical — and, therefore, the doubleentendre shocks you into laughter.
And while synaesthesia may not be an inherent faculty for 96% of people — it is estimated to be full-blown in only around 4% of humans — it can be induced through repetitive training. Of course, this sort of forced inducement is likely only to give us an artificial type of associative memory, and not the real deal — the actual phenomenological experience of synaesthesia. But it's a start, and scientists believe that hypnosis and regulated consumption of neurotropic substances can help achieve this (am I saying we should legalise it?).
In any case, we can borrow the principle of combinatorialism latent in synaesthesia, and incorporate its reported experience in our own thought experiments — which too combine ideas in new ways to produce new insights.
Of course, human society has evolved its own set of self-sufficingly mundane habits and patterns so that the populace is satisfied with its rigmarole routine, never needing to question or tap the deeper nature of the reality we live in. But as neurobiologist Vilayanur Ramachandran would say, “These questions come perilously close to being the kind of impossible-to-do armchair thought experiments that philosophers revel in. [But these experiments can help us] understand why apes care about nothing but ripe fruit and red rumps, while we are drawn to the stars.”
