How much do you trust your senses?

Remember the game you played as a kid where someone came up with a story and whispered it to his/her neighbor; then the person receiving the story would in turn whisper the story to the next person; and so on and on around a circle or group of people until it came to the last person. In every case, the story told by the first person was materially different from that told by the last person to hear it. That’s because each person would introduce an error (in some cases many errors) into the story. The more complex the initial story, the wilder the outcome story.

According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization at the University of Gottingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Gottingen, this chaotic messaging system is exactly how the cerebral cortex of our brains communicates. Further, they discovered that the information each neuron receives is lost rather quickly after receiving it. And, there appears to be no error correction system. In effect, the cortex is dealing only with occasional quick snapshots rather than a continuous input of sensory data and those snapshots are distorted by the cortex’s chaotic communication system. This could explain sensory illusions…

Approximately one bit of information disappears per active neuron per second. “This extraordinarily high deletion rate came as a huge surprise to us”, says Wolf. It appears that information is lost in the brain as quickly as it can be “delivered” from the senses. (Out Of Mind In A Matter Of Seconds, Medical News Today, 25 Jan 2011 – 3:00 PST)

My interpretation of the data is that we are mostly NOT sensing our world. We are taking short snapshots of it – the rest we make up!

Yes, you read that correctly – we are mostly living in a make believe world. We take a piece of data (a sensory snapshot) and extrapolate from there. This calls into question what we trust most – our senses. Do you trust your senses? I do. “Show me the money!” (Jerry Maguire, TriStar Pictures) If you can’t trust your senses, what can you trust? It’s a serious quandary, imho.

Based on these studies at Max Planck Institute, I’m rethinking my trust of my senses. I think it may be wise to exercise a little more skepticism about what I see, hear, and/or feel – “Question Reality” as the bumper sticker says. No wonder I trust multi-sensory experiences more than single-sense experiences – when one sense confirms another, I have two witnesses – kind of like error checking, having two senses report the same phenomena is less likely to be erroneous than if I trust only one sense. Still, considering how chaotic my cortex is, I have to exercise skepticism even when confronted with multi-sensory data.

Based on my experience, I’d have to admit: a healthy dose of skepticism is definitely useful. I’m not quite as fast to trust what I see or hear or feel now. Also – it’s probably a bit less than optimum to assume you understand someone else’s viewpoint when you can’t even trust your own!

Study source: Dr. Fred Wolf , Max-Planck-Gesellschaft