In what ways can less sensory input lead to increases in perception?
Asked by
hominid (
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August 4th, 2014
If I look out across a landscape on foggy day, I’m struck by how depth is on display. The beautiful simplicity of trees and objects – and how the closer an object is, the darker it appears – reveals startling shapes that are lost in a sea of color during a clear day.
While I strive to see clearly (in many ways), I wonder if clarity can sometimes be found in moments when of apparent obscurity.
I recall when I painted, I would occasionally squint my eyes until they were almost closed or temporarily view things through my tshirt in order to see gradations of light. In blocking most of my visual input, I was able to see something better than I had before.
And when I would create sample-based electronic music, I would often spend hours manipulating samples. Limiting or filtering frequencies allowed me to hear the tones and sounds which had been there the whole time, but were obscured by the flood of other frequencies.
In what ways can limiting input allow us to experience things more clearly?
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2 Answers
It’s a “bandwidth” problem. The senses deliver way more information than the brain can process into perception. The scope of information being monitored can be wide, including a broad range of information (at the expense of resolution); or the scope can be narrow, freeing up bandwidth for resolution.
If a complex visual field is being monitored the brain will prioritize how it allocates bandwidth, typically including tasks like identifying the objects in the field, patterns of movement and spacial relationships. These are low resolution tasks, but they convey information pertinent to basic functioning, so they get prioritized. When the visual input is filtered, there is less raw information to monitor and so bandwidth is freed for more detailed perceptual processing.
This, by the way, is the mechanism behind how meditation quiets mental chatter. The chatter consumes a lot of bandwidth. By mobilizing the attention in a monitoring task like a high-resolution monitoring of the breath or a very broad monitoring of the whole sensory stream, the chatter is deprived of bandwidth and dies down.
I wonder if some of the clarity could be the brain filling in the missing data?
When the world is shrouded in fog and objects appear and disappear seemingly at random, do we fill in the details where we know there should be some but our eyes tell us there is none?
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