An Essay on Perception.

Every time I look in the mirror my mind argues with what it sees. Not because I don’t like what I see or I think myself fat or anything. Between each time I see my reflection my mind constructs a mental image of my appearance, and by the time I see my reflection again I began to believe my mental picture of myself and when I see my face in the mirror I don’t really recognize it. My perception of myself doesn’t agree with my actual physical features and so what I see in my mind’s eye differs from what the onlooker sees. Each human being has a mental picture, their view of the world; shaped by imagination, beliefs, dogma, experience, dreams, instincts, whatever. People see the world in their own special ways, but is this inner world so very different from the real one?

In the mind’s eye we take the information our senses give us and create a mental map of our surroundings, our memories, our ideas; we base these mental maps and pictures on what we do remember and fill in the information we don’t remember by imagining things that could possibly belong. For example if you asked any student at West Georgia Tech Carroll Campus what is the third machine on the left side walking into the student center they would probably wrack their brains to try to remember whether a snack machine or a drink machine sits there, and get frustrated when they can’t remember. So they probably would answer that there’s a snack machine, not because they remember, but because they know there are snack machines in the Student Center and that side of the Student center mainly focuses on the food whereas the other focuses on drink. The mind captures information relevant to a place, or a person, or a thing and stores it away for later use, it doesn’t remember everything, and it can infer the information based on what would make sense in the situation or place.

Colors always seem so much more vivid in memory. The mind views color as a very important aspect of whatever it saw and so remembers color and exaggerates it. The sky always seems bluer, the grass greener, the sunlight brighter in retrospect when really it was just another day, the same sky, the same grass, the same sunshine that your best friend felt and saw that day that you got a raise and she got a cold, but she remembers it quite differently. So who was right? In truth the sun wasn’t very bright that day because it was overcast, the grass had lost the green due to a month’s long drought and the sky was obscured by clouds. However the mind gave brilliancy to that memory due to the strong positive connotation associated with it.

One psychological theory about human behavior discusses the “imaginary audience,” which is the mental belief that at all times a person is scrutinized by others. Like believing that you’re fat and everyone around you is thinking about how fat you look and why did you even decide to wear that shirt because it doesn’t help you look any skinnier. No one is looking and judging you but your mind tells you that everyone must be, because you don’t feel sure of yourself and so you are self-conscious. That was your perception but really everyone else was so caught up with themselves and their own issues to even barely register that you were wearing a shirt far less how it looked on you.

In the real world noting happens in slow-motion. Time cannot be distorted. So remembering something as happening in slow-motion is a concept of perception. Life isn’t the Matrix; bullets cannot slow down when it suits them. So when you remember that every single second of the car accident in striking detail and swear that it happened in slow-mo that is just another example of your brain seeing things in way that it can better understand.

Real life rarely ever makes sense. The brain’s primary function is to try and make as much sense out of sensory information as it can and translate it to the consciousness in a way that the mind can understand. Taking the cold hard truth and presenting it in an easier to comprehend way means a skew in perception, a leap between truth and fantasy, and an entirely human view. In the words of a great man, Gustave Flaubert  “there is no truth only perception.”