Do we see the world as it really is

[Music]

okay uh

thank you thank you very much indeed um

so the theme of

the theme of today’s session uh is

distortion

and as i was thinking about this uh it

occurred to me that the very concept of

distortion

implies that there’s an original or a

real version of something

and a distorted version and

that sort of line of thinking about the

being an original or a real version

versus a distorted version really begs

or

poses or brings up one of the very

oldest questions in psychology and

philosophy

which is of course do we see the world

as it really is

so do our powers of perception and

reason

really give us a sound and accurate

picture of the world

or is it the case that our perceptions

and our

reasoning uh are always incomplete

and flawed so that perhaps we are only

ever able to gain an incomplete

or perhaps a picture a picture of a

shadow of reality

which is really what plato thought uh

approximately two and a half thousand

years ago

of course the everyday answer the

everyday answer to this question is that

perception certainly

seems to work perfectly accurately and

perfectly well

despite all the glare i can see a world

of people i can

open my eyes and see a world of people

and objects and be very very confident

that i can take

a few steps forward and walk around the

obstacles in front of me pick

up the objects and talk to the people

talk to the people that are here

so so perception seems to work

perfectly well we seem to open our eyes

it seems simple and effortless

but is it really that simple is it is it

really that straightforward

well an approach which is available to

us here in the 21st century which of

course wasn’t available

to plato uh and his contemporaries is to

look inside the skull and ask well how

much brain power

is involved in the apparently simple act

of just opening our eyes

and looking out at the world well if we

look at

if we do look inside the skull what we

can see is the

is the surface of the cerebral cor the

surface of the brain cerebral cortex

is divided into four main lobes as we

can see here the occipital parietal

frontal and temporal lobes and it

turns out that all four of those lobes

of the cerebral cortex are critically

important for vision not only that

of course underneath the cortex there’s

a whole range of subcortical brain

structures

and it turns out that several of those

are also

critically important for vision

so uh i’ve always been very surprised by

this it’s always been surprising to me

that so much of the brain

which we think of as our organ of

thinking uh

is really devoted to this apparently

simple task

of just seeing of of perceiving the

world

of course on the other hand it’s also

true that when we think

about thinking and when we talk about

thinking

we often do that in highly visual terms

we talk about ideas that are opaque or

hazy

or perhaps crystal clear we talk about

theories that may be insightful

or enlightening and we talk about people

who are very bright

or perhaps if we want to insult them we

might say that they’re a bit dim

so so perhaps you can see what i mean

here you can and you can see

where i’m going so so vision is

something that in our everyday lives we

take completely for granted

and we use phrases such as seeing is

believing

on the other hand perhaps

like the character neo in the classic

movie the matrix

we can occasionally become aware of

become aware of

little cracks and fissures in the

structure and sort of coherent

of our visual reality so if we look at

this picture here which is a still from

the matrix we can see that neo

uh is holding up four fingers and i hope

that all seems completely obvious to you

he’s holding up four fingers there and

if we move to this slide and i ask you

again

how many fingers am i showing you here

again the answer seems completely

obvious

well obviously there’s three but if we

look at a more complete picture

uh we can see what but well actually

perhaps the answer might be

two well you might say well

well that’s just a visual trick let’s

look at something a bit more

straightforward let’s

let’s just get this straight and if i

ask you are these lines

perfectly are these lines straight and

parallel

again the answer seems very obvious

obviously they’re

they’re straight and parallel um but

what about these ones if we look at

these ones do you think these ones are

straight and parallel

well as i look at them there’s no way

that they look straight and parallel

they seem to be sort of waving all over

the place

but if we superimpose the two slides

we can see that in fact both sets of

lines

are perfectly straight and perfectly

parallel

so this is a very well known illusion

it’s called the cafe wall illusion and

it’s called that

because this man here very eminent uh

british psychologist called richard

gregory

was having his lunch one day several

many decades ago in bristol

and he glanced across and saw this uh

this particular cafe wall actually

noticed the illusion described it and

then studied it

and a little bit a little bit closer to

home actually here so here’s a much more

scaled up version of the cafe wall

illusion

uh which i believe you can see on the

side of this building

in melbourne okay so uh

so perhaps seeing isn’t always believing

and one of the things that has a strong

influence in

on how we see things is the context in

which we see them

so if we look at these two orange discs

here on this slide

this is another very well known illusion

called the ebbinghaus illusion

we can see that the one on the right one

on the right looks relatively big the

one on the left looks relatively small

but of course they’ll be looking at the

one on the right in the context of these

somewhat small little gray little gray

discs whereas the one on the left is

we’re

looking at that in the context of these

much larger discs

and if we take that context away what we

can see

is that in fact the two discs are

exactly the same

size so it turns out that context

that context can have some very powerful

influences on the way

we see things we often talk about

people who see things in black and white

and the reason we say that

is that black and white do seem like

such polar opposites and you couldn’t

possibly argue

you know that black is white or that

white is black

but let’s just have a look at this

illustration here which is a very clever

demonstration developed

by a vision scientist called edward h

adelson

so what we can see here is a black and

white

checkerboard and if i ask you

which of these two squares is darker

square

a or square b so which one looks darker

well i hope you’ll agree

that a clearly looks quite a bit darker

but if we look at this illustration a

little

more carefully what we can see is that

we’re looking at

b inside the shadow that’s being cast by

this

large uh green cylinder

so let’s just see if a is really darker

than b

by taking away the visual context

of the rest of the figure including the

shadow so let’s leave the

lose the left hand side the right hand

side

some of the context around the two

squares and we take away the last little

bit

and we can see that in fact a and b are

exactly the same brightness

so we can argue actually that black is

white and white is black

and it’s not in and it’s not an entirely

silly thing to uh

to say and just to show you that there’s

no there’s no real jiggery poker here

keep looking at a and b and let’s put

the context back in and as we add in the

shadows and the rest of the figure

you can see that when we add the context

add the context back in again again

a looks totally different to b okay

so what we can see from this uh is that

context can have these very

powerful effects on the way we see

things visually

so what about how we see the world of

ideas and beliefs

can context also have powerful effects

in that more abstract

cognitive domain and i’ll illustrate uh

i’ll illustrate this by talking about a

very well known study

carried out by these two psychologists

here daniel kahneman and amos taversky

and as many of you will know uh kahneman

went on several years

several years after this study was many

years after this study was published to

uh

to win the nobel prize so back in the

early 1970s

kahneman and tversky dreamt up this

scenario

which as you can see is uh spookily

relevant

to the situation in which we find

ourselves today

what they asked their research

participants to do

was to imagine that the country they

were in new zealand in this case

is preparing for the outbreak of an

especially

virulent virus and people were told if

urgent steps are not taken

we’re going to lose 600 lives

so then the participants were asked were

presented with this

choice they were asked to choose whether

or not we should adopt

program a or program b so pro so the

programs could be to do with

alternative vaccines or it could be to

do with lockdown

protocols and so on uh some procedure

for reducing the impact of the virus

and what the people were told was well

if we go with program

a 200 people are going to be saved

whereas if we go with program b there’s

a one in three probability that 600

people will be saved and a two in three

probability

that no people will be saved so when

faced

with that choice a large majority

72 percent chose program a

they preferred the certainty of saving

those 200 lives however

what kahneman and tversky also did was

to recruit a second group of

participants

and and the second the second group was

given this

choice they were told if we adopt

program a

400 people are going to lose their lives

whereas if we adopt program b we have a

one in three probability that no one

will die

and a two in three probability that 600

people will die

when faced with these choices a

similarly large majority in fact a

slightly larger majority

went for program b but if you look at

these

alternatives carefully or even not that

carefully you can see that in fact the

information is exactly the same

losing 400 400 of the 600 lives is

exactly the same

as saving 200 of the 600 lives and the

information in pro

for program b is also in fact identical

so what we can see from this uh is that

is that if we present uh essentially

identical phrase

identical information in different

frameworks in different

contexts we can produce radical changes

in people’s preferences

and judgments so if we present

yeah we can produce these very strong

changes

just by changing whether or not we

present the information in terms of

saving lives or in terms of losing lives

so we’ve got an election coming up here

in a few weeks time and i gather there’s

another election

happening in america at the beginning of

november

and of course if any of the candidates

and parties in those

elections won a majority in the mid or

high

70 percents they’d be absolutely

delighted and ecstatic

so so what we can see from this

is is that these context effects can

produce very powerful and very dramatic

effect

very dramatic influences uh on people’s

preferences

so context can be critical in perception

even when you’re judging something that

seems simple and straightforward

such as how bright something is how

large something is

whether or not we have a straight line

but also

when we’re making these complex

high-level judgments

about what we should do when faced with

a global pandemic

so so what what can we learn from this

what can we conclude from this

you might be a little bit worried at

this point and think well

can we ever really trust our own

perceptions and our own judgments

is our view of the world really at the

mercy

of the particular and specific context

that we just happen to find ourselves in

you might worry and feel like w b yates

that you’re

that your head is spinning uh at this

point because

the things you thought you could see

clearly and the foundations of your

beliefs and judgments perhaps suddenly

they don’t seem so

firm anymore and perhaps they’re

suddenly more fragile

and and perhaps prone to disintegrating

well i think that would be that would be

a very negative con

a very negative uh conclusion but i and

i think there’s a much more

positive way of thinking about

the way in which context can influence

our perceptions and our judgments and

i’d like to illustrate that

by stepping away from psychology for a

few moments and stepping into the realm

of physics

and of course the the second part of our

question is really centrally about the

nature of the world and of course

questions about the nature of the world

are really really in the province of

physics

not the province of psychology so um

back in 2016 uh this man here carla

rivelli

wrote a fascinating book called reality

is not what it seems and one of the

points that ravelli

made in this book is that we can view

reality from multiple perspectives

so we have our everyday perspective

where we have a world of

solid objects

objects appear solid there and they

exist at a particular

place in a particular location in space

and at a particular point in time but

ravelli points out that that breaks down

completely

when we start to think about what’s

happening at the

almost unimaginably tiny uh

tiny spatial scale and brief time scale

of the way in which fundamental

particles interact with each other

and of course our perceptions of time

and space are also radically different

when we consider

the the much the almost unimaginably

large time scales where stars and whole

galaxies

may form so so reality so we can see

reality from multiple perspectives

so so i think the the the message that

i’d like to

finish with is to say that

when we approach a really big question

such as do we see the world as it really

is we’re very unlikely to get a complete

answer

by looking at it from a single

perspective if we want

if we really want to gain a more

complete uh

a better and more complete answer we’re

going to

we’re almost certainly going to need to

step out of our own

uh particular contextual silo as it were

and that silo

might be your at your own academic or

scientific discipline

of course we of course at the moment

we’re living

in in very difficult and challenging and

potentially very divisive

times so perhaps there’s also a more

perhaps there’s also a broader lesson to

to learn here about trying to think

about

issues from a different perspective and

of course that different perspective

might be the perspective of somebody

who’s at the opposite end of the

political spectrum to the

to the location where you are or it

might be somebody from a different

social or cultural

group psychologists refer to this as

perspective

taking the ability to see something

as it might be seen from a different

point of view

and recently the neuroscience of

perspective taking it has

made some quite interesting advances by

looking at the brain regions that become

active

when you imagine looking at a visual

object

from a different point of view or if you

imagine

adopting a different belief from the

belief that you currently

hold and interestingly uh some

very common areas are lighted up when

you do both of those things when you

imagine a different visual point of view

and you imagine a different cognitive

point of view

so that’s perspective taking it it

emerges quite early in childhood

in stages between the ages of about two

and

five years old um and the final thought

i’d like to leave you with

is that we know that young children can

do perspective

taking but perhaps it also might be

something that’s been

going to be very beneficial and helpful

for us to practice that a little bit

more

as adults as well as as well as when we

were children

and that’s and thank you very much for

listening