My husband
has been enjoying a nostalgic trip to the early 1960’s since he’s found a
YouTube channel that streams “Mr. Ed” shows. Mr. Ed was a horse that could
talk, but he would only do it with his owner. Mr. Ed was quite neurotic and was
always getting into various difficulties (it seems that the basic premise of
the show was so outrageous that the writers realized they could take it just
about anywhere).
When Mr. Ed
was “talking,” his lips would move and a deep voice would speak. It’s a funny
experience because part of your mind knows—of course—that that voice isn’t
coming from the horse, but another part suspends disbelief and all of a sudden
you’re ascribing human thoughts and emotions to Ed. (According to Wikipedia, the
horse’s trainer at first got the horse to move his lips by putting nylon string
in his mouth, but it didn’t take long for Mr. Ed to start moving his lips when
touched on the front hoof by his trainer.)
One of the
basic premises of We Are ALL Innocent by
Reason of Insanity is that we are not aware of reality itself, but a
mind-generated version of reality. Our senses take in various perceptions, and
these are filtered through both hard-wired circuits (inherited from our animal
ancestors) that construct a version of physical reality, plus beliefs,
assumptions, and memories we have formed in our lifetimes. All this filtration
and reality-construction happens before
we become aware of the perceptions.
The illusion
that Mr. Ed is talking is one example of the distortion caused by this process.
When we see a mouth moving—even if it’s a horse’s mouth—and hear words being
spoken, our minds naturally link them up.
Ventriloquists
exploit this same illusion to trick us into believing that their voice is
coming out of their puppet’s mouth. I love Triumph the Insult Comic Dog by
Robert Smigel. Triumph is a crude rubber dog, and it’s absurdly obvious that
“his” voice is coming from off-screen, yet the illusion is created that Triumph
is really speaking or singing. In a video
on Conan Late Night about the cruise ship that lost power in early 2013 in
the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Smigel plays with the ventriloquism illusion. Sometimes
the camera backs off and you can see Smigel’s mouth moving when it’s supposed to
be Triumph speaking; at other times you see a close-up of Triumph “speaking”
and his mouth isn’t moving. My mind said, “Something’s wrong! How can he be
speaking if his mouth isn’t moving?”
In other words, my brain was totally buying into the illusion.
The art of
foley is another example of how our brain’s processing of visual and aural cues
can create an illusion of reality. We see someone’s leg breaking and we hear
celery snapping, we see someone being punched and we hear a raw steak being
hit, we see someone riding a horse and hear two coconut halves banging together
(see Monty
Python’s The Holy Grail for an
amusing riff on this illusion; at the very beginning of the clip you can see
the servant with coconuts), and we really believe
we’re hearing the actual sound of whatever action we’re seeing. I’ve thought
about this while watching action movies—how does anyone know what the sound of
a fifty-foot monster kicking around buses on a city street sounds like?
I saw a
short film on Vimeo recently that provides an example of another way the brain’s
reality-construction algorithms distort reality: we tend to interpret actions
as the volitional choices of an agent. Psychologists have described how
research subjects will watch shapes move on a computer screen, and then come up
with stories that explain why the shapes move the way they do. “The triangle
wanted to get away from the circle,” they might say. Our minds were clearly
designed to look for signs of agency in the world, and then come up with
explanations for our observations that ascribe intent to the moving object. You
can see how this would have been a benefit to us in this past. For example,
imagine seeing grass moving in the wind, and a lion stalking through the grass.
We distinguish between the movement of grass and lion, because the lion has the
intent to move towards the antelope to attack, while the grass’s movement has
no intent, it is the passive response to the wind.
Watch “A Girl Named Elastika” and notice the
sensations of belief popping up, that even in this short animation using
push-pins and rubber bands, the illusion of action and volition seem real.
Optical
illusions are a great way to explore how the mind creates our reality.
Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto gave a TED talk in 2009 entitled “Optical
Illusions Show How We See.” One of Mr. Lotto’s demonstrations involves a
drawing of various geometric shapes. He isolated two sections of the drawing
that conveyed exactly the same visual information to the viewer’s brain—same
shape, size, and color. Then he revealed where these two areas fit into the
larger diagram: one was the shaded side of a yellow box while the other was an
illuminated side of an orange box. They may have conveyed exactly the same
information to my retina, but when I looked at the complete picture I saw
different colored boxes, one in shade and the other not. The two surfaces didn’t
look the same to me, even though I knew they were identical.
The lesson I
take from this is the importance of humility: always be willing to question my
perception of reality. If I can be so wrong about reality as to think a horse
is talking, what else might I be deluded about?
