Seeing things

Just a short anecdote today.

A couple of weeks ago I was riding my bike to work, just like I tend to do most days. The route that I cycle is nice and quiet, away from busy roads, and so it's very rare that I come across other people at all.

On this particular occasion I was approaching a hill and concentrating on the ground in front of me. As the track started to rise I glanced up the hill for a moment and I saw another cyclist coming toward me on the opposite side of the path. I can see the image now as clear as I could then. Front on I could see their front tyre, their cycle helmet, and even white shoes spinning the pedals. Definitely a cyclist.

My attention returned to the track directly in front of me, but as I'd registered someone else on the track ahead I looked back a few seconds later. To my astonishment there wasn't a cyclist coming at all. Instead, in exactly the same place visually, but just off the track, was a wooden post.

There are no turnings off the path anywhere near where I was, nor could the cyclist have moved out of sight in such a short interval of time. I am in no doubt whatsoever that what I saw was in fact the product of my imagination. A hallucination if you like.

Now of course this is the kind of story that most people should be able to relate to, seeing something that on closer inspection is actually something completely different, and it comes from the way in which the visual senses work.

I think what was happening with my cyclist was that part of my brain, the department of my subconscious that has learned how to see the world I live in, had detected an object at that location but didn't have enough time to fully identify what it was. Instead what it did was put in that place an image of what it most expected that object to be given all the evidence it had. Of course, given more information, it realised it was wrong and when I looked back the object became a post.

What I find interesting about this is that it illustrates to me that my brain does have the capacity to produce visual hallucinations, and of course from that I can derive the confidence that sooner or later I will be able to tap into that ability under the effects of a hypnotic suggestion.

Let's take this concept one stage further though. Let us suppose that what the conscious mind sees is not the world, but rather the subconscious mind's interpretation of the signal from our eyes. It's a heck of a lot of information to process in real time, so as we grow up the mind learns how to simplify this process by making assumptions, replacing familiar objects and scenes usually in our peripheral vision with remembered images. This suggests that a huge proportion of the world that we experience is more the product of our imagination than of our senses.

In this respect we are all hallucinating all of the time.