The Deception of Perception, Stefan Kengen
ZDay, Berlin Germany, March 14th 2015
WHODUNNIT?
[The Inspector] Clearly,
somebody in this room murdered
Lord Smythe who, at precisely 3:34
this afternoon, was brutally bludgeoned
to death with a blunt instrument.
I want each of you to
tell me your whereabouts
at precisely the time that
this dastardly deed took place.
[Maid] I was polishing the
brass in the master bedroom.
[Butler] I was buttering his
Lordship’s scones, below stairs, Sir.
[Lady Smythe] Why, I was planting
my petunias in the potting shed.
- Constable! Arrest... Lady Smythe!
- But... but how would you know?
- Madam, as any horticulturist will tell you,
one does not plant petunias until May is out.
Take her away.
It’s just a matter of observation.
The real question is how observant were you?
Did you notice the 21 changes?
(And action!)
- Clearly, somebody in this room murdered
Lord Smythe who, at precisely 3:34
this afternoon, was brutally bludgeoned
to death with a blunt instrument.
I want each of you to
tell me your whereabouts
at precisely the time that
this dastardly deed took place.
- I was polishing the brass
in the master bedroom.
- I was buttering his Lordship’s scones,
below stairs, Sir.
- Why, I was planting my
petunias in the potting shed.
- Constable! Arrest... Lady Smythe!
It’s easy to miss something
you’re not looking for.
[Applause]
The Deception of Perception
.
The Deception of Perception
Or How Your Brain Fails You On A Daily Basis
Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
So, a quick show of hands,
how many of you have seen this video before?
Ahh 3, 4 people, 5 maybe.
How many of you got any of the changes?
3-4-5 people?
How many have you didn't get any?
Ahh, OK. I rest my case: the whole room.
It's fascinating, isn't it?
Ok, also erstmal möchte ich mich vielmals
bei Franky und TZM Berlin bedanken.
Es ist eine sehr große Ehre für mich,
hier zu sein,
und hoffentlich werdet ihr
nachher nicht zu enttäuscht sein.
And for those of you who didn't get that,
it was his me
sucking up to the German chapter.
[Laughter]
Okay, speaking of me, I'd like to
point out that I am not a scholar,
I'm not a scientist. I'm here to
try do get your juices running.
I'd like to present you with a lot of
information that I hope that you'll pick up on
and take to the next level.
So if you think I'm full of shit,
please go ahead- debunk me.
I want you to do that; I want to validate ...
all this information that
I’m about to share you. Okay.
Now were going to do a brief
introduction of neuroscience if you will,
which is just kind of a few
pointers about the history.
Many people think neuroscience is
kind of a new field, a new topic -
it's not really. People have been fascinated
with the brain for thousands of years.
So we find for instance reports of the
euphoriant effect of poppy plant seeds
in the old Sumerian records, and
many people would be
familiar with Hippocrates
who discussed epilepsy as a
disturbance of the brain way back when.
And back in the scientific era if you will,
of the Muslim world in the year 900,
Rhazes describes seven cranial
nerves and 31 spinal nerves
in his medical work of the time called
'Kitab al-Hawi Fi Al Tibb'
or something like that,
I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that -
please don't hold that against me.
1543 - the Dutchman Andreus
Vesalius posts his work called
'On the Fabric of the Human Body'
and gives the fullest account of
the brain anatomy to that time.
He got a lot of stuff wrong but he got
an impressive amount actually correct.
Fast forward a little bit.
Can't really talk about science
without mentioning this guy.
1859 - Darwin ...
comes along and shakes up the whole
scientific process from then.
Moving along...
In the year 1900,
Sigmund Freud comes along and
tips the boat again if you will,
introducing what is effectively the ...
field of psychology which
is still debated today.
And of course,
bringing it a little closer to home,
in the 1970’s Benjamin Libet
at the University of California
did a series of studies that basically shows
that the brain is engaged
in decision-making activity
long before we’re actually aware of it.
And this is of course very controversial
stuff and he's been heavily debated.
One of his most verbal
critics is Daniel Dennett,
who is in his own right really great guy -
I recommend his work here.
He is a cognitive scientist and philosopher
and he's got a great book ‘Consciousness
Explained’ which I heartily recommend.
And this guy will be familiar to a
lot of you; Peter just mentioned him -
one of my favorite scientists and science ...
how do you say that ... communicators.
I like his work because he's very good at
understanding how these causalities
work and he’s very good
at describing to the rest of us who
don't understand any of this stuff,
how it works.
So I really recommend his stuff, and
these implications have
far further reaches then we
tend to think on a normal average level.
So here he is in a small clip with Alan Alda,
discussing the justice system.
[Alan Alda] So, what do you see as the...
the contribution of
neuroscience at some point
to the justice system?
Does it start in the court room,
or should it start
all the way at the beginning,
reframing our laws?
[Dr. Robert Sapolsky] Well,
you know we professor types state things
in these very cautious, qualified ways
so I'll do that here and just say...
the whole system has to go.
Modern criminal justice system is
incompatible with neuroscience.
It simply is not possible to have
the two of them in the same room.
[Applause]
Well he said it- must be true!
[Laughter]
Well actually,
there's more evidence to support this claim;
it's not just taken out of thin air. Right
here in Berlin you have something called
The Computational
Neuroscience Centre in Berlin,
and this is John Dylan Hanes who is
the leader of the theory and analysis
of large-scale brain signals,
and I think the way that he
summarizes it just says it all:
“Decisions don't come from nowhere
but they emerge from prior brain activity.
Where else should they come from?
In theory it might be possible
to trace the causal pathway
of a decision all the
way back to the Big Bang.
Our research shows that we can
trace it back about 10 seconds.”
And then was some kind of usual scientific
humility he goes on to state that
“Compared to the time since the
Big Bang that's not very long.”
He’s completely just
validated all that Benjamin Libet did previous, so
this is interesting.
Okay so where does that leave us today?
It leaves us with a range of different
kinds of neuro “stuff” to look through.
We’ve got Neuroendocrinology, Neurobiology,
which is kind of the hands-on stuff,
then you got Neuropsychiatry -
the pathology of it all,
you got Neuropsychology,
you know, "let's talk about it,"
and then you have Neurophilosophy -
it’s like “what's it all about?”
and then of course you have a lot of
Neurobollocks! which you could call it.
There's a lot of interesting, interesting
information floating around out there.
Now, how many of you are
familiar with this statement?
“We only use 10% of our brain capacity.”
Yeah? Oh, about half the room.
How many have you believe it to be true?
Ahh, not very many.
Thank god, you're on the right
path here people, that's good.
Okay.
Well, in the words of Barry Gordon at
the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine,
"It turns out that we use
virtually every part of the brain,
and that the brain is active
almost all of the time.
Let's put it this way:
the brain represents three percent
of the body's weight and uses 20
percent of the body’s energy."
And then he goes on to state...
“Ultimately, it's not that we
use 10 percent of our brains,
merely that we understand about 10
percent of how it functions.”
So if you're going to go
with that 10 percent number,
use that one.
It’s much more accurate. Okay?
Here’s another great guy
I want to recommend to you,
his name is Christian Jarrett.
He's a young British scientist -
cognitive neuroscientist. He’s a
science writer, he’s got a great blog.
By the way all these links are
available to you. I’ve got a PDF
with all of this stuff
in it so if you want it,
it's gonna be in the video link, later on.
He’s got a great book, ‘Great Myths ...
of the Brain’
and among his peers,
he's really well respected
for really grasping what
this stuff is all about.
Okay, so let's move into
some practical stuff here.
This is what I like to
call Your Unreliable Brain.
Now, your brain is hit with approximately
400 billion bits of information
per second.
You have about 100 billion brain cells.
About 10,000 neuronal connections
connect each of these,
and you have about 1 trillion interactions
going on in your brain per second.
2,000 of these can reach
your immediate consciousness,
and seven of these can
reach your immediate memory,
one of which you can actually react upon!
So these are the odds people -
that's what you're up against! Okay?
I'm gonna do some simple experiments here;
it's not gonna be visible to everybody,
but this is known as selective perception
and here are a couple of
visual examples of that.
I realize because of the size of the room
many of you are probably not going to
perceive this,
but I mean, go home and check it
out later on if you haven't already.
Now this first one is known
as the Ebbinghaus Illusion,
and as you stare at this
image you're probably going to
feel a little bit queasy because it kind
of feels like it's wobbling all around.
Of course is doing no such thing,
but your brain is telling you that it is.
This next one is the Herman Grid
and as you stare at this, you're gonna
see strange little grey dots appear
in the cross-sections of this image.
And of course there's no such
thing as a grey dot in sight but
your brain tells you that there is.
We've got these ambiguous images -
these go way back, several centuries -
and some of you might be seeing a young girl
with her head turned looking
to the back of the room.
Others of you might see an old
lady looking slightly to the left,
to the front of the room,
and to help you a little bit,
here is the young girl- you
can kind of see her eyelash,
a tiny little nose and
chin there with her scarf,
and those have you who see the old lady,
you’re going to see
two eyes facing the front with what
was a chin before is now the nose,
and the small nose is now a big wart on that.
So, these are interesting,
interesting images.
Next are these physiological
illusions which are really funny.
The Swiss artist M.C. Escher did a lot
to popularize these back in the '80s.
These are kind of impossible
3D images and of course the impossible cube -
some of you might be familiar with this -
and then you have the trickery of light.
Most will agree that
the tile here marked with an ‘A’
is visibly darker than the
tile marked with a ‘B’
but as as you see when you connect
them they are in fact the same color,
and this is the trickery of light.
And speaking of trickery of light
does anyone even remember this one?
A of couple weeks back,
this went viral all over the world.
This is from the Danish media- it was
on the TV, it was in every newspaper,
and of course it's the
infamous dress syndrome.
Here is the infamous dress - actually
there is a both blue and a white version.
But, it all began with this guy,
one of my other favorite people on the
planet, Doctor Neil Degrasse Tyson,
who is of course the
theoretical astrophysicist and
the director of the Hayden
Planetarium in New York,
a great science communicator,
and he tweeted this the other
day in relation to this image.
"If we were honest about the
shortcomings of human physiology
then 'optical illusions' would instead
be labeled 'brain failures'."
And I think this says a lot.
We think it's kind of quaint
and funny and all that,
but it's really stopping us from
understanding what's going on around us.
And speaking of understanding
what's going on around us,
has anyone noticed anything about this slide?
Use your perceptive powers.
The comment! Right.
What's that all about?
I swear wasn’t looking for it,
I just went to the original tweet
and that was the first
comment made in that section.
And I thought to myself- oh my god
we've got a long way to go! I mean ...
Okay, so just break it down a little bit,
I'm not gonna take you through
the whole physiology of it all but this
is a cross section of the human eye.
I am gonna explain a little
bit of what's going on.
You've got something called the fovea
which is like the focal point of the eye.
What you have here is a graphic
representation of the human left eye.
On the Y-axis you have the
distance away from the eye,
on the X-axis you can see your
visual acuity kind of dropping
to either side.
What's happening here is
the brain can only ...
focus on one thing at a time
so it kind of makes up stuff all the time.
So that's why you get this wobbling
effect and the grey dots appearing
and all that,
so your brain isn't really reliable at all.
Another way to look at
it- the light spectrum is
completely immense yet the human visual ...
capacity is only between
400 and 700 nanometers.
So on the short wavelength we
got stuff like deadly gamma rays
and X-rays that we cannot perceive until it's
way too late and we're dying of cancer...
(huge amount of pain).
And the same thing goes on the
longer side of the spectrum.
You've got stuff like microwaves.
We can't perceive radio waves or
broadcast bandwidths at all so
we're really rather limited here.
Okay jumping forward a little bit,
there's a great website out there
that I really recommended -
it’s called AsapScience.
They’ve got a YouTube channel with
a lot a great videos explaining a lot
of these physiological phenomenon
so I really recommend that.
I’m just going to do a few here because
I think they're really interesting.
This one is called the McGurk effect,
and it is the “effect of
a perceptual phenomenon that
demonstrates interaction between hearing
and vision in speech perception.”
And instead of just
mumbling all about that I'm gonna play it to you.
[Announcer] Listen to Greg speaking.
bar bar bar bar bar bar
What do you hear?
If you heard "bar bar bar" you'd be right.
But how about now?
far far far far far far
Chances are you've heard "far far far"
this time, with an F, except
you didn't. In fact, the audio didn't
even change between the two videos.
Strange as it may seem
what you hear depends on
which video you're looking at.
Go ahead, take turns watching each
video and see how the sound morphs.
This is a perfect example of
something called the McGurk Effect
which shows how our visuals can
alter but we believe we're hearing.
Fascinating, isn't it?
[Applause]
Right,
here's another one that I totally love.
I'm not gonna even bother explaining
it because it's gonna sound completely
like mumbo jumbo but you’re
going to get it once you actually
hear what's going on. Check this out.
[Announcer] Listen to this audio
clip of the gradually climbing tune.
♫  ♫  ♫ ...
And yet if I play the
exact same clip back to you
it will sound like it's only
continuing to climb higher and higher.
♫
I swear this is the exact
same clip I just played.
You can rewind that section of this video
over and over and check for yourself.
Try it. Each time you start it over the
tune is seemingly climbing even higher.
It's called the Shepard Tone Illusion,
of which there are many variations.
It's true. I mean you have to have
a long time pass and do other stuff
before you can actually
reset that effect, so
be careful what you trust
when you hear stuff.
Okay, just a little bit of fun facts
about the human auditory system.
If you look at other animals,
elephants have been reported to be able
to hear as low as 5 hertz actually;
it's not on this graph. Mice can hear
upwards of 100,000 cycles per second and
dolphins up to as much as 200,000.
Now humans - we're here.
We’re between 20 and 20,000,
most a little less, and it will actually
decline as you get older all the time.
So, we can’t hear what's
going on around us either.
Okay I'm just gonna tie this
into a little bit deeper topic,
something known as cognitive dissonance
and, I'm not gonna go into it too much,
just present you with the guy
who actually coined the term
and recommend you the book which
is fantastic - Dr. Leon Festinger,
and he also has a great quote I think
just kind of summarizing his work
which is “I prefer to rely on my memory.
I had lived with that memory a long time.
I am used to it,
and if I have rearranged
or distorted anything,
surely that was done for my own benefit.”
That kind of ... summarizes that whole-
that's how we feel about
ourselves and how we feel about
our way of perceiving things,
but is very far from the truth.
Okay.
To wrap things up,
how does is apply to TZM or anyone?
Well I think it applies in major,
major huge ways actually,
because - what are we?
Well, we're a social movement.
What does that entail?
It entails social interaction.
And if you don't understand
your own perceptions,
you have no chance of understanding
everybody else’s perceptions.
So, of course, it's about communication,
and you need to understand
what communication is,
what that entails, and that begins by
understanding how your brain functions.
Also of course, we’re global in scope.
We want to transcend borders.
We want to ... break down artificial
borders that separate people
whether they are racial or
sexual or national or whatever.
And in order to do that,
we have to really understand what's going on,
on a cognitive level if you will.
And even though its global,
top down in that sense, it starts with you!
Each and every one of you
have to improve in order to
improve upon the rest of stuff.
So, I'm going to give you
some recommendations here.
Lumosity.com is a great training website.
It's not free but it's very,
very well sourced and [a] very
scientific way of training different
areas of how your brain works
and I recommend it to anyone.
It's just a small series a games- you
spend 5-10 minutes on it every day
and you actually improve in
a lot of areas.
Next, I also want to point out that most
of the American and European universities
are now putting their
curriculum out there for free,
at places like iTunes U, other places.
You can find most of what's
out there absolutely free
and you can follow any
course and some of them
you can even take a degree
just by watching that.
It's not the same merit as
actually going to the school but
I mean the info is out there
and again I would recommend Sapolsky’s
work on “human nature” if you will,
because that's really mind opening.
Also, there's a great YouTube
channel called TheraminTrees;
some of you may be aware of this.
It’s got a great series of what's
known as transactional analysis,
which is a very good way of looking at
conversational techniques on how you can
find yourself in a loop, not getting
anywhere and how to get out of that.
It's very easy to understand and apply.
So, I’ve been with the Movement now for
the better part of 6 years anyway and
I've come to learn that patience really
is not a virtue, it is a necessity,
because it's hard work. As Gilbert said,
you kind of expect coming in,
changing the world tomorrow-
doesn't work like that.
So, I'm just going to leave you
with a little afterthought here:
If you improve upon yourself,
you can’t help but improving
upon the world in the process.
So, thank you very much.
[Applause]
www.TheZeitgeistMovement.com
