Perception

Perception seems to be an effortless process. When I look out into the garden in front of me, I see the lawn, trees, and my son swinging on a swing.

When a baby is born and encounters the world for the first time, we must assume that it has very limited organization of what it perceives. Perhaps there is just a sense of more or less light, the smell of the mother, the feel of her skin. But, immediately, we imagine these perceptions begin to be classified and organized. From initial confusion, begins a process of distinguishing objects, initially, perhaps simply as good/agreeable or bad/disagreeable. We know that we are predisposed to pay attention to face-like shapes and by repeatedly seeing the faces of the mother and other family or community members, there begins the process of being able to distinguish them as objects among those available in the world and then to be able to identify them.

A similar process is happening in the auditory world too. The baby hears sounds and among those sounds are words and among those words are some that are repeated more frequently. Caregivers will point to objects and name them, but there is also a general background of words and other sounds that are being organized and eventually can be identified and even repeated. The child's introduction into the linguistic world comes through imitation of the sounds that it hears and the beginning of mastery of the tongue and throat muscles to reproduce what it hears.

I still remember clearly when I was staying in Paris and learning French. I would listen to the radio each morning and suddenly, one morning, what had the previous day been an unbroken chain of sound, now became a stream of words. I'm sure that I didn't identify each word beginning and end immediately, but my mind, immersed in these sounds, had somehow found the knack to split the stream into objects that could be identified and understood.

We can experience this process at a much smaller scale when first learning chess or another game with pieces and positions. Here, of course, the pieces are already identified as separate objects moving in the world of the game but initially we are not able to distinguish between the bishop and the pawn or the king and the queen or to identify a position of check or where a piece is menaced. But after a game or two things become clearer, distinctions can be drawn and each piece is assigned to one or more categories, ranked in order of power and importance etc. When a grandmaster looks at a game in progress even briefly, they can reproduce the positions of all pieces easily because of the depth and quality of their perception - built up over thousands of hours of play.

But once we have moved beyond the initial identification of objects and on to the effortless recognition of them? What is mature perception?

Perception is a powerful instance of Habit - we do not consciously perceive as the baby or the beginning chess player does. We are able to look around, situate ourselves and identify the objects in our surroundings due to the work of learning that we have done in childhood and to the deep habits we have acquired

X in The Mind is Flat says: "The mind-as-mirror metaphor can't possibly be right - we need a very different viewpoint, that perception requires inference." and suggest the following principles of the operation of perception (and, by extension, thought):

• We see only meaningful organizations (or, at least, the most meaningful organization the brain can find): visual chunks, patterns and whole letters, numbers, words, rather than a random scatter of fragments.
• We see just one meaningful organization at a time.
• Other sensory information that is not part of this meaningful organization is largely or even entirely ignored, to the point of becoming invisible.The brain is continually churning: despite the unaccustomed lack of new input, the brain is desperately attempting to disengage from the current organization, and to find another. When it cannot, the image entirely disappears.
• Perceiving is a type of thinking and perhaps the most important type, with all other types of thought being just powerful extensions of perception.

My image for perception is of many thought traces bubbling or forcing their way to the surface of the mind. Concepts of colors, shapes, borders, biographical memories and scholarly knowledge surge forward to provide meaning to the scene and objects perceived. And this is happening all the time, as your eyes rove over a scene or are watching images on a screen or reading words on a page.

Reading is a particular form of perception which is learned and is peculiar to humans. We can imagine how it is learned:

• Initially writing must be identified as an object amongst those is the world.
• Individual letters are probably identified first, but possibly short words may be instead. The shapes and sounds of letters are identified
• Then groups of letters are identified as words where each word has its own sound (generally derived from the sounds of its component letters) and a meaning. Certain words can be associated with physical objects in the world - "That is a cat" - while others have other less concrete meanings
• Then groups of words are identified as sentences which have a meaning.
• While making all of these identifications, we are additionally, passively, learning that certain sequences of letters are more common than others (and some are never seen), that certain sequences of words are acceptable, while others are not, and a variety of other grammatical rules, many/most of which also apply to our spoken language