Focus: Rendering Our Personal Reality
Physicist John Wheeler: “To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator.’ In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.”
Is our reality actually real?
Modern physics has shown us that matter is not made up of smaller bits of actual stuff, but of condensed energy, and what we consider to be matter is an emergent experience of that energy. Everything that we experience in the world around us emerges from a mental process. Without it, the information of light and matter couldn’t reach us.
What is energy without a mind to interpret and experience it? In an objective sense, all the stuff around us is nonphysical in the same way the scene described in a novel doesn’t actually exist. Or in the way that computer language can render a virtual reality.
Could reality exist without a participant to focus on it?
Does virtual reality exist without a player? Does the scene in a novel exist without a reader? How about the data on an old CD that we can no longer play?
If data doesn’t meaningfully exist without being interacted with and interpreted, wouldn’t that imply that the entire universe itself emerges out of conscious experiences? From this perspective, the energy of the universe is not only immaterial, but utterly irrelevant without participants around to experience it.
Physicist Leonard Susskind: “Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.”
The physicalist argument is that we live in a physical reality and our awareness of that reality emerges from how our brain processes the stuff around us. But quantum mechanics tells us that all that “stuff” is actually just energy that interacts with the energy of our bodies.
An object feels solid to us because the electrons in atoms dance, not randomly, but in distinct patterns, as with synchronized dances or the movement of a flock of birds.
What appears to us as a solid object is just a cloud of subatomic particles moving in special ways relative to one another, which together produce the experience of something solid. Light interacts with these clouds, preventing us from seeing through the object.
The elephant in the room is that all of this processing happens mentally, so there is no way to ever conceive of anything outside of the mental realm.
Science itself is a product of mental processes.
Physicist Max Planck: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
What we conceive of as real is what our mind focuses on and tells us is real.
Our illusory world
Neuroscientist Anil Seth: “The perceptual world that arises for us in each conscious moment, a world full of objects and people with properties like shape, color, and position, is always and everywhere created by the brain.”
All of us can think of a time in our life when we misread a situation, where our idea of a particular event turned out to be the exact opposite of someone else’s experience.
As we perceive our environment, our brains take in sensory information and create a working model of the physical world around us, quickly analyzing our bodies and our surroundings, making best guesses that can result in perceptual illusions.
Physicist Max Tegmark: “We already know that our brain is astonishingly creative in interpreting the same basic types of electrical signals… we perceive them as colors, sounds, smells, tastes or touches… The key difference lies not in the neurons that carry this information, but in the patterns whereby they're connected.”
Our brains are natural pattern seekers, using our unique array of past experiences to interpret the new patterns that we come across each day.
Throughout our lives we stumble upon illusions of all kinds, where we interpret sensory input one way, only to find out that our brain could also interpret the information as something else entirely.
If you can see both the duck and the rabbit, you are more likely to be able to come up with more novel uses for an everyday item than those who cannot. r
Originally printed in a German humor magazine from 1892, the famous rabbit-duck illusion distinguishes perception from interpretation, transforming the perception, “This is a rabbit,” into the interpretation, “I see it as a rabbit.”
As with other illusions, scientists have correlated specific interpretations of the rabbit-duck with past experiences and a particular context, with one study finding that respondents tended to see a bunny during Easter and a bird or duck in October.
Similarly, a recent study of the famous young-old woman illusion from 1915 found that perception of the ambiguous figure was affected by own-age social biases, with younger and older participants viewing the woman as younger and older, respectively.
Instead of analyzing the entirety of every single snapshot of the world around us, our brain pieces together visual input and tricks us into perceiving a stable environment.
Everything we see in any given moment is a mashup of the brain’s last 15 seconds of visual information. r
If our brains were continually updating visual information in real time, the world would feel like a chaotic place with constant fluctuations in light, shadow, and movement, and reality would feel more like a hallucination.
We are quite literally living in the past, since what we experience as the present moment is delayed by how our brain processes environmental stimuli, which is why we don’t notice subtle changes that occur over time.
Neuroscientist and Psychologist David Marr: “Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.”
Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues that because our brain takes in sensory information then actively generates the content of our conscious experiences, we are in effect living in a constant state of hallucination, and as a result, our agreed upon reality is simply an agreed upon hallucination.
As we go through life we experience all kinds of sensory illusions, with our brains continually making best guesses of what is probable given our past experiences.
Anil Seth: “We don't just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in.”
In 2015 an optical illusion called the Bezold Effect went viral, as people debated whether a washed-out photo of a dress posted on social media was white and gold or blue and black.
Wilhelm von Bezold was a 19th-century physicist and meteorologist, who discovered that he could change the color combinations of his rug designs entirely by changing only one color.
Our retinas are covered with photoreceptor cells shaped like rods and cones that convert light into electrical impulses, which are then transmitted to the brain. The exact arrangement of cones is unique to each of us, affecting how we perceive colors and shapes, as will our surroundings, the time of day, and our past experiences.
Discrepancies in color perception arise because the colors that we see are not a property of an object itself, but rather of the light that is reflected into our eyes from an illuminated surface.
Our brain interprets the light distribution of an entire scene at once, then assigns colors throughout.
An effect known as “after image” illustrates how our brains can color in a scene. First stare at the blue dot in the following image for 30 seconds, then look at the black and white version. Your brain will overlay colors onto the scene, and the image will look like the original color image. r
This effect occurs after our retina becomes tired of a particular color and desensitizes our cone cells. When the color stimulus is removed and our eye is exposed to the black and white version, we perceive the complementary color for a brief period of time.
The image of The Dress resulted in so many interpretations because of the ambiguous way that the camera rendered the light.
The photo was both overexposed and had a color balance that did not match the illumination of the scene, so when we look at the photo our brains make different guesses at what colors to assign to the dress.
The overexposure of the photo resulted in a loss of visual information, with the brightest areas of the scene rendered as pure white with no color information at all, while the photo's color balance resulted in blue and yellow tones that don’t match our expectations of what a sunlit scene should look like.
Daylight looks bluish in the middle of the day, and yellowish in the morning and evening. Our brains use reference points in our environment to perceive colors and we unknowingly filter out the blue or yellow-hued lighting throughout the day. The limited distribution of colors in the photo, particularly the lack of red and green, further complicates our brain’s ability to differentiate colors in this particular photo.
In interpreting the photo, people will either filter out the blue and end up seeing a white and gold dress, or they will filter out the yellow and see the dress as blue and black. This filtering is a result of a number of factors, some personal, including our past experiences, and some contextual, such as lighting conditions where the photo is viewed. r
In the months after the image of The Dress went viral, scientists launched a number of studies to examine why people saw the colors in such divergent ways. Researchers found that regardless of how and where the photo was shown, people who were early risers were more likely to think the dress was lit by natural light, perceiving it as white and gold, while night owls saw the dress as blue and black.
The amount of time we spend in natural light versus artificial light, at the computer for example, may be impacting how we see color everywhere.
Cognitive Psychologist Steven Pinker: “Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.”
Our senses work together to interpret our environment, so what we hear can be influenced by what we see in an illusion known as the McGurk effect, where watching the movements of a person's lips can trick the brain into hearing the wrong sound.
Another common example of an auditory illusion is binaural beats, where the right and left ear each receive a slightly different tone, and the brain perceives both together as a single tone that is the difference of the two.
Prussian meteorologist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove has been credited for discovering binaural beats, also called “brain entrainment,” back in 1839, although only recently has the phenomenon been used for new kinds of mental and physical treatments.
Our brain has five types of brainwaves, each associated with different levels of awareness and relaxation. Binaural beats introduce a new frequency to the brain, which has been shown to reduce anxiety, help with sleep, reduce pain, and manage tinnitus.
If illusions can be therapeutic, could our interpretation of reality be our brain’s way of protecting us from overwhelming complexity?
Our bodies can experience tactile illusions, such as phantom limb syndrome, when sensations are still experienced in the area where an arm or leg has been removed. The nerve endings at the site of the amputation continue to send signals to the brain, making the brain interpret the limb as still being there.
It’s as if our brain can get locked in the past, unable to cope with a changed reality, creating physical and emotional illusions in an attempt to help us navigate the complexities of life.
Psychiatrist Norman Doidge: “The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.”
Our brain not only creates models of our own unique physical world, but also models of our emotional, social, and cultural worlds, and the resulting illusions, or biases, can be harder to spot than physical illusions.
Confirmation bias is our tendency to look for information that supports, rather than rejects our opinions, where we make judgments based on what appeals to us, rather than the sensory information itself.
This can happen when we seek out information, for example, if we were to Google “Are dogs better than cats?” to verify that dogs are better, we would just find lots of pages in agreement, whereas if we Googled “Are cats better than dogs?” we’d find lots of pages extolling the virtues of cats.
We also have a tendency to be creative with the information we take in, collecting evidence that confirms our views, while ignoring contradictory evidence, in the same way that social media algorithms feed us content based on our likes.
Even our memories contain biases, since we tend to remember the things that confirm what we already think, for example, the time that Johnny got into a fight, not the time he made us laugh, because well, Johnny was a jerk.
What feels like an objective view of the world around us depends on our unique physiology, our surroundings, and our previous experiences, which brings us to the subtle powers of the mind, and our natural abilities to not only heal, but also change the reality of our day-to-day life.
Philosopher John Searle: “Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.”
States of mind
Philosopher Roy Wood Sellars: “No problem is more crucial for a naturalistic view of the world than the mind-body problem.”
Most of us are familiar with the placebo effect, where a person’s symptoms are altered by a harmless and nontherapeutic pill, typically a sugar pill, that researchers use as a control in testing new drugs.
The placebo effect can be so strong that the amount of people improving with a placebo can be nearly as high as those receiving the actual drug, and patients who undergo long-term treatments with placebos have experienced withdrawal symptoms when treatment ends.
The opposite phenomenon, called the nocebo effect, has been observed when placebo patients with negative attitudes towards treatment report a worsening of symptoms.
Study after study has shown that what we believe directly affects our body.
Negative attitudes and feelings have been linked to all kinds of medical conditions, including chronic pain, fatigue, hormonal imbalances, compromised immune systems, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, digestive disorders, and infections.
Sri Chinmoy: “I meditate so that my mind cannot complicate my life.”
In life we deal with three main types of stressors: physical stress, such as accidents and injuries, chemical stresses, including bacteria and viruses, and emotional stress.
No matter what kind of stress we encounter, whether it’s life-threatening or not, our bodies react in the same way, setting off a cascade of physical changes known as the fight-or-flight response.
These changes include increased muscle tension and respiration, faster heart rate, decreased blood flow to the extremities, lower immune responses, and slower healing, all the physiological changes needed for facing an imminent physical threat, but when these changes become chronic, they wear down our body and create illness.
Our brain changes when we are in survival mode, and begins to fire incoherently.
Our thinking becomes more disordered and erratic, impacting our emotional state, which in turn affects our body even more.
Physician David Agus: “There's no question that the mind-body connection is real, even if we can't quantify it. Hope is one of the greatest weapons we have to fight disease.”
In a 2014 study that was replicated in 2018, researchers asked people to map out where they felt different emotions in their bodies. They found the results to be surprisingly consistent, even across cultures.
People reported that happiness, and even more so love, made them feel warm all over, while depression had the opposite effect, dampening feelings in their head, arms, and legs.
Danger and fear triggered strong sensations in their chest, with anger being one of the few emotions that activated people’s forearms and hands.
Our body reacts to our emotional state, which can then affect our patterns of thought and disrupt how we sense our bodies, contributing further to physical and mental health issues. If the feedback loop continues unchecked we can get locked into perpetual states of dis-ease. r
The connection between emotions and health is so strong that we even see it in the language we use. Beginning in the 14th century, the term “dis-ease” was used to communicate a “lack of ease,” and was understood generally as discomfort, uneasiness, or distress.
By the end of the 14th century, the meaning was extended into a general term for illness, and by the 16th century the word disease was used to refer to specific illnesses.
Nicholas Cummings, a psychologist who did research at Kaiser Permanente in the 1960s, found that he could predict the amount of emotional distress a patient was in by the thickness of their medical chart. Later Cummings’ research became the basis for adding psychotherapy coverage to health insurance plans. r
Three-quarters of deaths worldwide are from noncommunicable diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which are overwhelmingly due to lifestyle factors and stress, not underlying physiological conditions. r
Mind/body connections are found in the structure of our DNA.
Stress has been shown to shorten our telomeres, the “end caps” of our DNA strands, which causes us to age more quickly.
Like other biological organisms, our bodies adapt to our environment. Our cells don’t detect the environment directly, instead they rely on our nervous system to send environmental information, and they adjust their biology accordingly.
Gautama Buddha: “What you think you become.”
Since our mind is interpreting our surroundings, the signals that our nervous system sends to our cells is affected by our perceptions, thereby adjusting the function of the cell and affecting how our genes are expressed.
Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change a DNA sequence, but rather change how our body reads a DNA sequence. These changes have been shown to affect embryos, tissue differentiation, and the development of diseases, including immune disorders and cancer. r
Over the past few decades, researchers have found evidence of biologically inherited trauma, where the physical changes from trauma altered how the gene functions (an epigenetic change), although not the gene itself (a genetic change).
The power of mind/body connections brings us back to the constructive power of our thoughts.
Our thoughts become our actions, our actions become habits, and our habits become our character, and ultimately, our character charts out the path of our life.
While modern physics has begun to paint a picture of a participatory reality, other disciplines, such as cognitive science and epigenetics, are coming to the same conclusions, that our reality is ultimately a reflection of our mind.
Physicist Max Planck: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Living in a participatory reality would mean that there is something fundamental about our conscious experiences, that awareness is not simply a byproduct of physical processes, but is something larger and more universal.
Physicist Erwin Schrödinger: “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
Guided investigations
References
Albert Einstein, Hanoch Gutfreund, 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity
Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld (1938). The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. Cambridge University Press. Bibcode:1938epgi.book.....E. Quoted in Harrison, David (2002). "Complementarity and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics". UPSCALE. Dept. of Physics, U. of Toronto. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
David Bohm, Basil Hiley, The Special Theory of Relativity
Abeln V, Kleinert J, Strüder HK, Schneider S. Brainwave entrainment for better sleep and post-sleep state of young elite soccer players - a pilot study. Eur J Sport Sci. 2014;14(5):393-402. doi: 10.1080/17461391.2013.819384. Epub 2013 Jul 18. PMID: 23862643.
Zampi DD. Efficacy of Theta Binaural Beats for the Treatment of Chronic Pain. Altern Ther Health Med. 2016 Jan-Feb;22(1):32-8. PMID: 26773319.
David, J Ben; Naftali, A; Katz, A. Tinntrain: A multifactorial treatment for tinnitus using binaural beats. The Hearing Journal: November 2010 - Volume 63 - Issue 11 - p 25-26,28 doi: 10.1097/01.HJ.0000390818.17619.65
Max Planck, Interview in 'The Observer' (25 January 1931), p.17, column 3
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