What we see with our own eyes is not necessarily a reality.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Kaizhi School” (ID: Openmindclub), author of the Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Illinois, and co-founder of “Fashion Fashion” Jin Jing; authorized to reprint.
What we see with our own eyes is not necessarily a reality. The reality we perceive is the reality that is obtained by sensory screening and pre-judgment.
“Choose a red pill or a blue pill?” This is a key bridge in The Matrix. For many people, the picture below shows a similar situation – two pills, blue on the left and red on the right.
However, after removing the other colors on the picture, what color are these 2 pills?
(The screenshot above is from the video What is Real? – Optical Illusions & The Matrix – Facebook F8 2015 – Michael Abrash – Oculus VR)
Maybe, what we see with our own eyes is not necessarily a reality. The reality we perceive is the reality that is obtained by sensory screening and pre-judgment. This is the psychological basis for virtual reality.
The essence of virtual reality is to reconstruct reality. Why can we reconstruct reality, reconstruct what is the cognitive and neural basis of reality, and how can we reconstruct reality?
1, selective attention
Perception is one of the oldest research topics in psychology. Research in brain science and cognitive psychology found that people’s perceptions include Bottom-Up Processing.And Top-Down Processing:
In the bottom-up input process, sensory cells receive external signal stimuli, such as light and sound, and convert them into electrical signals, which are uploaded to the specific sensory processing area of the cerebral cortex through the central nervous system for processing.
At the same time, the top-down process from the cerebral cortex, due to attention, memory, experience, expectations, motivation, and emotions, also compares sensory input information.
For example, the famous “Invisible Gorilla” experiment is a classic experiment of selective attention (also called “non-attention blindness”): because people focus on the number of passes, they never noticed the passing. Gorilla.
Selective attention A classic application in everyday life is that when you buy a brand or something yourself, you suddenly discover that there are suddenly more people around the same thing. Another example is that when faced with fuzzy information or two-dimensional graphics, people will also explain according to experience and expectations.
The benefit of the synergy between the top-down and bottom-up processes is that the sensory system of the brain can still be in a stable manner when the external sensory information is incomplete, unstable, and constantly changing. Cognition around the world.
This involves a phenomenon called “filling-in”. Since people’s perception systems have a filling effect, in visual presentation, it is not necessary to show all the details, and people can also fill them into a whole through active processes.
The famous Gestalts Effect is an important manifestation of perceptual filling. The core view is that the whole is larger than the sum of parts.
This phenomenon plays an important role in the application of virtual reality, because it does not need to render all the details on the screen, as long as you find the threshold acceptable to people’s perception, and provide some but sufficient information, you can achieve the same perceptual effect. .
2, adaptive
Another important feature of perception is adaptability. There have been many studies that have demonstrated that the brain has neuroplasticity, and when a part of a structural or functional disorder occurs, other parts can be compensated.
For example, the famous Prism Glasses Experiment found that when people wear a special prism that can make the outside world look upside down, although it is difficult at first, people can quickly adapt to such vision. Enter, after 1-3 days, you can process the reversed information and live a normal life.
This adaptability works better when completely isolated from the normal world, ie if you get up in the morning, turn off the lights before going to bed at night and pick up the prisms, then you will adapt faster.
The picture is famous “Kanizsa Triangle”
Another important application of adaptability is sensory substitution. One of the famous characters of sensory substitution is Paul Bach-y-Rita, a company called Brainport, which is dedicated to transforming touch into vision to help blind people:
Our device has a camera that receives external information, converts the information into a microcurrent, conducts it to a sheet on the tongue, and the tactile electrical signals on the tongue are transmitted to the cerebral cortex.
After a period of training, the blind can establish a direct connection between the tactile sensory cells of the tongue and the visual cortex of the brain to “see” the world. With the brain’s powerful plasticity, people can quickly adapt to the world of virtual reality, even if it doesn’t look completely true.
Human cognitive characteristics make perceptual reconstruction possible. In fact, we are no stranger to the application of perceptual refactoring: most people may seldom notice consciously that what they hear when they call is not the real voice of another person, but through electrical signal transmission and digital weight. Constructed analog sound.
Similarly, virtual reality is the reconstruction of visual information. It shields the outside world and deceives your senses, thus creating an imaginative space.