Why You Should Question Your Reality
Humans are remarkably good at adapting to change. We find ways to live in just about every climate on Earth, and circumstances that seem tough at first can quickly begin to feel normal. Underlying these adaptive skills is a flexibility in how we see and understand the world around us.
Our intuition makes us believe that our eyes are merely a window onto reality. But our brains are actually interpreting input from our senses to create practical impressions of reality, rather like how an impressionist painter might depict a scene in a distorted but charming way.
This means that two people can have very different perceived realities, and the same person’s reality can change over time. One clue that your brain uses to determine how that reality should change is background abundance.
Abundance shifts your goalposts
In 2018, a paper published in Science showed just how malleable human perception is. The researchers were interested in measuring “creep” in mental concepts. When commercial products expand beyond their original scope, we call it “feature creep”, and when military aims expand beyond their initial intentions, we call it “mission creep”. In this paper, they were investigating what you might call “perceptual creep”.
In their first study, the researchers asked people to look at colored dots on a computer screen and decide whether they were blue or purple. Each person saw 1000 dots, each presented individually. The color of each dot was randomly sampled from the spectrum I’ve created below. Everything on the left side of the midpoint dot was considered objectively purple while everything on the right side was considered objectively blue.
You might define the colors above differently to their objective location on the spectrum, but subjective differences between people didn’t matter here. The researchers wanted to test how overall color perception across a group of people would…
