Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ of what might be here, and then it has played a clever trick on me. It has persuaded me that, instead of the picture being inside my head and I’m all around it, I’m in the middle and the picture is all around me. The same thing is happening to you. What you’re seeing is a picture inside your head, but your brain has tricked you into thinking that you’re in the middle and the picture is all around you.’

      I go on, ‘If we could take these pictures out of our heads like a photo out of a camera and hang our pictures on the wall so that we can all walk around and look at them, we would find that no two pictures were the same.’

      The next part of what I say reveals in the audience’s reaction how little biology is taught in our schools, or taught in such a way that the students do not see the implications of what they have learnt. Most of my audience – even when they are medically trained – find what I say next amazing. I run through all the features of the pictures where there would be differences. In the structuring of the depth and distances in each picture there would be differences which relate to the environment in which the person had spent the first few months of his life when he was learning how to see. Babies do not just open their eyes and see. They have to learn how to see. The baby’s brain has to set up connections between the reactions of the baby’s retinas when light strikes them and those parts of the baby’s brain which can become the visual cortex. If this learning does not take place at the precise time when it needs to take place, the baby does not learn to see, and what would have been the visual cortex is taken over by some other cortical function. Just what connections are set up in learning to see depend on the environment the baby is in. Those of us who spent our early months in rectangular rooms learned to structure depth and distance differently from those babies who were in round rooms, like kraals or yurts, or those irregularly shaped spaces that some babies, like those of refugees in Darfur, spend their first months. The paintings by Australian aboriginal artists who grew up in the Outback pay little attention to parallel lines, right angles or perspective that dominate the structure of space by those of us who were put into rectangular rooms when we were born.

      I usually follow this with an account of how we have to learn how to distinguish small things close up from large things far away. If in our first year or so we spend some time in large open spaces we learn how to make fairly good guesses about an object’s size and distance from us. From then on we can look down a long road and see a car in the distance coming towards us. However, few of us as small children spend much time looking down from the top of a tall building to the street below, and so, when as adults we go to the top of a tall building and look down to the street below, what we see are toy cars and not full-sized automobiles.

      The next feature where there would be differences between our pictures is in colour. The world is not a colourful place. Colour is in the eye of the beholder, in the array of cones in the retina of the eye. There is no way of knowing whether what you call blue is the same as what I call blue. Some people, usually men, cannot see colour, or they confuse red with green. In my lectures I might refer briefly to the fact that there are not only huge variations in individual perceptions of colour but in the words we use when we talk about colour. The linguist Annie Mollard-Desfour is compiling Dictionnaire des mots et expressions de couleur (Dictionary of Words and Expressions of Colour). The first volume, Le Bleu (Blue) appeared in 1998, and the fifth Le Blanc (White) in 2007 with another six to come. In an interview with Laura Spinney for New Scientist she said,

      There is no objective reality of colour. It’s an impression, a sensation which forms in the brain based on information sent to it by the visual apparatus. To label that sensation, to transmit it to others, we revert to familiar symbols. Colour words, perhaps more than any others, reflect a society: its values, its practices, its history. In Benin in west Africa, for example, men and women have different colour vocabularies. Searching for colour words in literature, the press or slang, as I do, you are forced to confront the enormous diversity in the way different cultures, different symbolic systems, view the world.⁷

      Not only do different cultures identify and name colours differently but the connotations of each colour differ markedly. For the French white means purity, cleanliness and honesty but to the Chinese it is the colour of mourning. To the French someone who is just beginning to learn a skill is blue, but to the English a novice is green. For the English a pornographic film is blue but for the French it is pink.

      The biggest differences among the pictures we took out of our heads and hung on the walls would be in what each of us has noticed. No one ever walks into a room and sees everything. What we notice are those things that are significant to us. They are full of meaning. We notice the people we know, or the person we wish to avoid. We might notice an object that is strikingly different from anything we have ever seen, or something familiar but unexpectedly present. As Chris Frith wrote, ‘The brain constructs a map of the world. This is essentially a map of value. The map locates the objects of high value where I am likely to be rewarded and the objects of low value where I am not likely to be rewarded.’⁸ What we happen to notice is determined by our past experience, and, since no two people ever have exactly the same experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way.

      When we look around we see a world that is appropriate to our size, a human-sized world. Mice move in a mice-sized world, and elephants in an elephant-sized world. Mice see what is important to mice, and elephants see what is important to elephants. The human-sized world we see appears to be very solid. Our body seems to be quite solid. However, we are made up of atoms, and atoms are not solid at all. There is a solid central core which is tiny. Far from the core are masses of electrons orbiting around the core. In his explanation of electricity in a booklet for non-scientists, David Bodanis explained how an atom is mainly empty space. The booklet we were holding would not slip from our hands because the electrons on the surface of our hands were shooting a powerful force field upwards, hitting the force field coming down from the electrons on the bottom of the booklet. This means that, although we think we are holding the booklet, it is actually hovering a small fraction of an inch above our skin.⁹

      Presumably, if our brain were capable of seeing reality directly, this is what we would see, along with all those elementary particles with the curious names like charm, strange, tau and gluon. When physicists talk of discovering such particles, what they have actually seen is not the particle itself, but a trace that the particle has left behind. From this, the physicists conclude that a particle has whizzed by. In much the same way, when we see a straight line of gently dispersing cloud in the blue sky above us, we conclude that a plane high up in the stratosphere has flown by. We live in a human-sized world. To see particles directly we would have to be in a particle in a particle-sized world. Then the Large Hadron Collider at Cern would be unnecessary for us to establish whether the Higgs boson actually exists, but, whatever we were, we would not be human beings.

      My audience listened to this first part of my lecture with the kind of fierce attention we give to a speaker when we are being told something that we did not know but which we recognize as being of great importance to us. This kind of attention is different from the polite but bored attention we give to something we already know quite well. Later in my lecture I said something about teenagers and drugs, and immediately my audience looked bored. They knew more about drugs than they had ever wanted to know. What they wanted to hear was an account of how we perceive as it related to the difficult business of being a parent.

      Why didn’t this group of well-educated people know how they operated as human beings?

      Answer: because knowing this is both subversive and frightening, and it can challenge some of your most precious beliefs.

      After my lecture I had quite a long discussion with the headmaster. I am sure he knew that what I had said was subversive. He did not charge me with this because he recognized that I had spelled out in detail the dilemma СКАЧАТЬ