{"id":628,"date":"2021-04-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-30T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anyonecanscience.com\/?p=628"},"modified":"2021-04-29T14:14:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-29T18:14:16","slug":"a-controlled-hallucination-part-3-behind-the-curtain-of-cognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anyonecanscience.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/30\/a-controlled-hallucination-part-3-behind-the-curtain-of-cognition\/","title":{"rendered":"A Controlled Hallucination: Part 3\u2014Behind the Curtain of Cognition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thousands of years before anyone understood the brain and the mechanics of perception, the Greek philosopher Plato came up with his famous Allegory of the Cave<\/a> to represent how humans think about and perceive reality and truth. In the allegory, prisoners spend their whole life chained up in a cave, facing a wall with a fire at their back. Many objects, animals, and people pass in front of the fire behind them and cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners see these shadows and give each form different names. Eventually, a prisoner is released from the cave, but as he leaves, he finds it hard to adjust his eyes to \u201creality.\u201d Once he has finally adjusted to the light of day, he tries to return to the cave, to free his fellow prisoners and tell them about the real world. But the prisoners don\u2019t understand and resist him. The shadows are<\/em> reality as far as they\u2019re concerned. Plato\u2019s Allegory of the Cave can be seen as a commentary on knowledge versus ignorance, but it is also an interesting representation of human perception. As we\u2019ve seen for the past few weeks, what we perceive<\/a> and what we remember<\/a> aren\u2019t necessarily faithful representations of reality. At best, they are shadows on the wall\u2014vague recreations of the world that we label and seek to understand. Unlike the prisoners, we cannot escape the cave. . . not fully. We are trapped inside of our own brains, watching the shadows dance on the walls. Over the years, we have developed tricks and shortcuts that help us to better translate and label what we perceive, but these too can be flawed. And our flawed cognition is what gives the shadows form. To really understand how reality relates to perception, we have to understand where cognition comes from and what it gets wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may seem obvious, but to properly perceive and understand the world, your brain has to think about it. Cognition\u2014the raw thought-stuff of the brain\u2014is a mainstay of human consciousness. Descartes said it best: \u201cI think therefore I am.\u201d But what are thoughts? And how does cognition impact our perception of reality? To build an understanding of anything in the real world, we first need a language to represent it. These thoughts don\u2019t necessarily need to be encoded in a literal language\u2014some people report thinking primarily in images and others \u201cthink in thoughts<\/a>\u201d as Hank Green so elegantly put it. Some people who suffer from aphasia\u2014damage to the language centers of the brain that results in incoherent speech\u2014continue to demonstrate perfectly coherent cognition<\/a>. The languages our brains speak have a profound influence on the way we construct our reality. For example, there is evidence<\/a> that people who speak Russian\u2014a language that has different words for dark blue and light blue\u2014tend to have a more nuanced perception of the color blue than people who only have one blue classification. This phenomenon arises because our brains use the language of thought to translate the raw complexity of reality into simplified groupings of familiar concepts.<\/p>\n\n\n