Something of interest to psychologists throughout all of time has been the way in which everything in the environment around us is translated into sensory information in the brain. How have we learnt this ability to see things and make sense of the world? And why is it that the mind can be tricked by the information received through the senses. Descartes, a 17th century philosopher wrote about how as humans, we have an innate knowledge of the world around us and how it works, yet Shepard, a 20th Century psychology studied himself the phenomenon of sense with some interesting findings, suggesting that our knowledge might not be quite so faultless as we assume.
Shepard showed that the information from the outside world we receive is not always what is actually there. The biggest way to give proof of this is through optical illusions. When we see an illusion, we are often fooled into thinking something that is untrue, such as that two lines are of different lengths when they are in fact the same, or that two squares are of different colours when they are the same. Equally we can sometimes look at 2D pictures and see them as 3D images because of the way they are drawn with the use of perspective, only realising that we are wrong when we move and our viewpoint of the object remains the same. This is because what we are seeing is not actually what is in front of us, but an inferred image of the world based on the real stimuli we are seeing.
He went on to provide further evidence for this with a study, in which he showed participants pictures of two tables drawn from different angles and asked them to say whether they were the same or not. The fact that people were able to answer this sort of question, he suggested was due to our ability to mentally rotate objects. This is an example of our ability to infer things from the outside world which are not actually there. We can decide if two tables are the same without knowing everything about them, because our mind is able to fill in the gaps.
He suggested that our knowledge of the outside world and our ability to mentally visualise objects allows us to make sense of everything around us. Though illusions obviously can trick our mind, Shepard argues that everything we see may in some way be an illusion, and only an interpretation of the outside world by our mind. Shepard described this phenomenon as “externally guided hallucination”. This assumption is backed up by the fact that we now understand that we see colours because of the different light wavelengths that enter our eyes. This means that there is no physical reality to colour, but our brain simply chooses to displays the different wavelengths it senses to us through this method.
Shepard’s work may be more philosophical in terms of its outlook and not particularly useful to helping us in our real-lives, but his ideas are important as they have influenced a great deal of further work in cognitive and perceptual psychology. By knowing that what our mind sees is not necessarily what is there, neuroscientists have started trying to understand how the brain takes actual physical information from the outside world and translates it into images, and cognitive psychologists have started looking at how else the mind’s individual ‘perception’ of situations rather than the situations themselves may lead us to behave in specific ways.
Image from: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/optical-illusions/optical-illusions-burst
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