Models of Perception
I was reading an interesting journal article the other day. In it, it was suggested that we have different conceptual models of whats going on. We fit all the sensory information we’re getting to one of these models and we can figure out what is going on. When people are in a sensory deprivation chamber or something of the likes of that, their sensory information fits multiple models and they end up picking a false one (hallucinating). Similarly with drugs that impair your senses, your mind picks a model that is not representative of what’s really happening and you hallucinate. It’s interesting to see the incredible about of sensory information you need to have a basic understanding of what’s really going on around you: huge amounts of visual information, feelings from your skin all over your body, plus hearing, smell, taste, and other things.
July 5th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
[…] I’ve been reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. In it he suggets that our perception systems work both ways with one expectation-driven side making hypotheses and the data driven side where senses are input confirming or disconfirming those expectations and hypotheses. This fits nicely with my post on hallucinations from a few months back, where I suggested that hallucinations come from us fitting our sensory data to the wrong model or hypothesis. Dennett suggests the same, saying that arbitrary patterns of confirmation and disconfirmation by the data driven side could cause detailed hallucinations. His analogy is a party game where someone asks each person a question to figure out someone’s dream. The trick is the people answer yes or no depending on the last letter of his question. But through a series of arbitrary answers a story is built up based entirely on ideas of his own. […]