Perception Projection

Have you ever thought about how we project everything in our lives? Do you think that what you see, what you hear, what you feel is really happening in the places you think you see, hear for feel it?

We are so good at projecting a world around us that it really does seem to us that we live in a world that we experience as out side of us, that we experience in relation to us. But think about it. Take seeing for example; when we ‘look out of' our eyes, we see a so called 3D world around us. We see things in front of us, to the sides of us, above and below us. Then we assume that we are actually seeing those things at certain positions from us. When we hear a sound, we can detect the location of the sound, even the distance of the sound from us. Then we assume that we are hearing that sound at that place. How about feeling? We stub a toe and we feel the pain in the toe.

Actually, what is happening is that our brains are being fed information and then we project the result of that information in our minds so that we think we are seeing, hearing or feeling something external to us. When we see something, say a table in front of us, we are really experiencing a chemical reaction in our brains. Nothing else! The table we are seeing is actually in our brain as a mass of neural reactions. Part of that reaction is to project what we have come to understand as an image from the point of our eyes outwards. In the same way a projector does. The image in a projector is actually inside the projector and the image on the wall is a representation of the image, not the actual image. (well strictly speaking so is the slide in the projector). The image you are seeing now is not outside of you, its being processed and projected from the back of your brain, where the visual cortex is located. Unlike a film projector, the image is not being projected from your eyes. Your eyes do not see, your visual cortex does.

The same would go for sound and feeling. Your ears receive vibrations of air pressure and encode that as what we understand as sound. Our brains then use the information and time differences between the ears to project the sensation of sound at a specific location. What ever is the cause of the sound is not actually making any sound at all. Only differences in air pressure.

Think about that – the beautiful music we love is nothing other than differences in air pressure!!

We are the ones who make it into sound. With feeling/ touch, again our brains receive nerve impulses that encode those signals as touch or pain/sensation. In reality we are not feeling anything. The is no such thing as pain, or sensation.

We live in a world that is a 3D virtual representation of photons, air vibrations and electrical impulses. And we are so confidant that what we experience it as if it's actually out there. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even though we see a 3D world, we are only really getting a semi 3D representation. Our eyes are only about 4 or 5 cm apart. That only gives us a very narrow sense of depth. It's just enough for us to build a picture that has distance and depth. How different would the world look if we had eyes that were a meter apart, or if we had four eyes, two on the side and above and below the horizontal plain? What would the world look like if we could encode more of the light spectrum? What if we could see infra red, ultra green? How about x-rays or gamma rays? All these, like visible light, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Yet we don't see them.

We assume that what we perceive, is actually there, but we can never know the objects really look like, or what a trumpet actually sounds like (it doesn't), or what a tender touch really is. We live in a make believe world, something that we construct and project, but actually only exists in our heads. For all we know, we mat not even exist in physical form. Perhaps we project the sensation of being alive and living on a planet - how can we really know?