Perception

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Human Limitations

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Giraffe-sized Asteroid

We live in a vast universe that spans enormous scapes of time and space. But humans evolved to understand information in relatable quantities at a human scale. We conceive landscapes mostly in chunks we can easily walk, connected loosely by strands of distances we can comfortably drive. We live in the now, but relate to the future in terms of a past that we dimly remember. We can make plans just within a very narrow scope of time — days, perhaps weeks. The future is always elusive and vague. We don’t comprehend spans of time outside of our experience. The span of a million years, ten million, a hundred million, or even just a thousand are concepts which we can intellectualize about but can’t really feel. Even in our interactions as members of a species, we can each just maintain a web of a few dozen relationships. Space, time, and human interactions are limited for us. We don’t process and, thus, don’t truly comprehend, information of large or very small scales that are beyond our direct experience. It’s not who we are as humans. This has all sorts of ramifications beyond the obvious. It’s why it’s easy for us to…

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In-the-Moment Experience Versus Memory of Time

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San Francisco Pride Month Laser Show by Bruce Andersen 2023

Time really does fly. It marches like an unstoppable force. But our memories of the past events and our perception of time are not so immutable. In-the-moment experience and the memory of such are so very different. Our memories are problematic, at best, and completely fictional at worst. But we can choose what we remember; we can shape our own history.

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Musings About Time

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sand hour clock

The past is gone. The future hasn’t happened yet. The present is a liminal space between two non-existent things. We’re encouraged to stay present and live in the moment. But who really does that? Primarily, it’s young children and adults under duress. Young children live in the moment; their time is now. A toddler of a certain disposition doesn’t understand that taking a nap now will make them happier later. That kind of thinking requires conceptualizing a future self and taking actions now for its benefit. Those concepts take time to develop. Children typically develop time perception roughly equal to that of an adult by about eight years of age. [(2021) Development of Young Children’s Time Perception: Effect of Age and Emotional Localization] Another set of humans who are trapped in the moment are people caught in disasters — be it wars, personal attacks, illness, weather events, or earthquakes. Like young children, these individuals are also anchored in the present. When faced with the immediate demands of a catastrophe, there is little room left to consider the past or the future. Typically, as adults, we find ourselves oscillating between the past and the future, seldom pausing to embrace the now.…

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The Fragility of Normal

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Fortune: May you live in interesting times

We all want to go back to normal. We cry about it and complain: “Enough is enough. We want our lives back.” This need to “go back to normal” is always with us, although maybe on a different scale post-pandemic. But even before Covid, there were always things that disturbed our perception of normal: new teachers, new housing, new jobs, new routines, stores and restaurants closing, cars that break down, challenging illnesses, new bus routes. Towards the end of our vacations, we come to realize that, although adventures are fun, it is good to be home where things are as we expect them to be. This want of predictability, for having our expectations met, is at the crux of a deep-seated need for normalcy. We have a limited capacity for taking in and processing information — we have limited short-term memories. When there is a flood of unfamiliar data, we get overwhelmed. We end up not having enough cognitive and emotional capacity to handle the new stuff on top of all the other things we have to do. Sudden change makes life feel overwhelming. Anchoring Errors This brings me to anchoring errors, which are basically little cognitive traps our minds…

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Stress Response

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Terri the relentless tortoise

Stress is an actor in all our lives. As we grow up, our stress grows too. We perceive that stress as a sign that we are coping with more than our historical share. Every generation believes that their stress surpasses that of the generation before. So it is probably just an illusion — or delusion. What’s most important is how we cope with stress. Not all stress coping mechanisms are learned. Some are probably encoded — they come for free with our genetics. It can be easier to see these mechanisms in action by observing animals — particularly pets, whose behaviors we know intimately. Take, for example, two very different species that we have had as pets over the years — Terri the tortoise and Kushy the ferret. Terri comes from an ancient lineage of chelonians (Greek word for tortoise), who have walked and swam upon the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Kushy the ferret is of the Mustelidae family — weasels and skunks. Kushy was a descendant of a domesticated breed of ferrets that first became pets about four thousand years ago. We bought Kushy at a pet store; Terri was a rescue. Terri’s natural habitat is…

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The Music of Language

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Old World Language Families

The illustration above is created by Minna Sundberg. Unlike pictorial art, music is perceived and processed in time. Complex music — consisting of more than one melody woven together — is even more difficult to process than a single stream. It requires focused attention. It’s more akin to listening to several conversations at once even if they are speaking on the same topic. If attention strays for just a moment, vital data can be lost. Thus music comprehension improves over several listenings. Things like nuance in performance, which ride on top of the basic syntax and message, are easy to miss for novice listeners. Listening, like performing, requires the development of skills. Humans are poor at splitting their attention and multitasking, and thus are prone to missing a lot of details. Language is also much more than a ruled-based string of words. There is a melody to each that varies from language to language. The melody provides the underpinning of emotion to the informational content that words carry. It’s easy to create cognitive dissonance by using the wrong emotional music while delivering a message. People who are good at this are good at manipulation. This is because we listen to…

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