Let me start by asking a simple question.
1 x 10 = 10 x 1, True or false?
Well, It depends on how you look at it.
Mathematically yes, it’s true. I can fool 10 people once, but I probably can’t fool 1 person 10 times. Logic and maths aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
Let me ask another question!
Do we see reality?
What do you think you see when you open your eyes? Do you think you see the world as it really is?
The simple answer is no! Why? Because you don’t see reality as it is, you see reality as you are and as you have evolved to be.
Your brain is giving you the impression that what you see and feel is reality, but actually what it’s doing is making sense of meaningless information, and by the process of perception converting it into meaningful experiences.
Despite what you might think, perception doesn’t come directly from your 5 senses, it comes from our brains’.
Your senses are like a keyboard, sending raw meaningless information to your processor (which also lives in a black box).
If you understand the process of perception and the barriers to that process, then you can begin to interrupt and manipulate the perception process. Most designers will do this intuitively by selecting materials, finishes, colors, light, and spatial arrangements for the effect when combined together they create in the minds of others. We select and manipulate based on what we want other people to FEEL and THINK.
Nothing is moving except your eyes.
Perception matters because it underpins everything we think, everything we know and believe. It shapes our hopes and our dreams and dictates how we behave. Perception is how we view and understand the world and our entire universes. It is our sense of self.
Perception is how we experience and make sense of all the incoming information from our senses. Experience is only “experienced” if it actually means something to us.
Uncertainty.
Almost everything we ever do is done to reduce uncertainty. We have evolved to do everything we can to avoid the unknown. We attach patterns and meanings to events so that we can predict how they will behave. That’s why we learn new things, why we solve problems, why we design things to improve our situation and why we build our beliefs and theories. We need a predictable universe. But to get those new predictions we have to move away from what we think we know and move into uncertainty.
Uncertainty is the problem our brains evolved to solve.
Our brains create patterns from events so that we can predict the next step. The rising sun, the theory of relativity, the movement of the planets, the weather, train arrivals…We look for patterns to make meaningful predictions. To achieve this, we have to step into uncertainty to find out what we don’t know and make a pattern, or story from what we find out.
As a society, we create rules and laws to control communities and control uncertainty.
Our biological motivation for many of our social and cultural habits and reflexes, including religion and politics, even hate and racism is to diminish uncertainty, through rules, laws, and rigid environments.
Once we have established a pattern and given it meaning we use it to make Assumptions. Assumptions are our mental shortcuts. Assumptions keep us safe and are highly energy efficient. We assume we know what will happen next based on past experiences.
But there is a paradox here, predictability doesn’t innovate, and we do!
So, we raise questions, what if? Why? Innovation challenges our existing Assumptions. We step into risk, danger, and uncertainty. And it all starts with a question.
Creative brains thrive on what they fear most, uncertainty.
We are delusional.
Fortunately for us, we have evolved to have an imagination. We can step into uncertainty and reduce risk and danger by running a simulation in our minds.
fMRI studies carried out, show that our brains light up with activity in almost exactly the same way when we experience something as when we imagine it or even watch the same experience. When a child catches their finger in the door we wince with their pain. This is because we have something called mirror neurons that allow us to empathize and mirror what other people are feeling.
It’s a complex feedback loop that reinforces our understanding and meaning of events, forms our self-stories, and builds our beliefs. These moderate how we behave, which reinforces the meanings we attach to events. We see what we have learned to see and we understand what we have taught ourselves to understand.
We become what we think about and what we perceive. The ideas and thoughts that live inside us are made from our personal histories and feed our current and future behavior.
The ideas and thoughts that live inside us are made from our personal history and directly feed our current and future behavior.
This forms our ASSUMPTIONS. Our shortcuts, our stereotypes, our mindsets and we use the assumptions to understand and predict how the world works.
Assumptions are our well-trodden neural pathways. They are our shortcuts to our behavior, operated by our subconscious minds. Like emotions, we don’t have to consciously think about them.
Assumptions are essential for survival because they keep us alive and are the mechanism of prediction.
The problem and the paradox are that whilst assumptions reduce uncertainty, they also reduce creative or new thinking.
As I said, the process of making meaning out of meaningless information is the process of perception.
Perception, the process of how we interpret incoming information, depends on our assumptions, and our assumptions are formed by and form our beliefs. To think creatively we must step outside this bubble.
You begin to see things differently if you interrupt the process of perception and step into uncertain territory.
Which is why all creative thinking begins with a question…What if…or Why?
Information is meaningless until we give it meaning.
All the raw data and information that comes to our senses is nothing more than electro-chemical information. Essentially information is meaningless until we, our brains, perceive it and give it meaning. Perception is what the brain does, it creates meaning from meaningless information.
Information, in and of itself, has no purpose, until meaning gives it purpose.
Our senses have evolved through what we need to survive.
Evolution naturally selected only what is useful for our survival.
All Light is electromagnetic radiation and we have evolved to see only a small proportion of the spectrum. We don’t see UV light and we don’t see Infrared light. Bees have a highly sophisticated sense of color that enables them to see UV light and thus find the right flowers.
Birds have twice the number of color receptors in their retinas than we do. They see polarisation, which allows them to see the electromagnetic structure of the sky and not just shades of blue (or grey if you’re from the UK). They see a meaningful navigational landscape composed of shape and structure.
For instance, water tastes of nothing, it is neutral. This is necessary for humans so that we can tell, by even the smallest nuance of taste, if there may have been some contamination, like a dead animal, in it. We experience difference, change, and movement.
There is no instruction manual.
Unfortunately, we don’t come into the world with an instruction manual.
We must learn to respond by trial and error, although we are hard-wired for somethings.
We stand on the shoulders of giants and we inherit a collective consciousness that we call our ecology.
We get beyond meaning by taking action.
We build cities, societies, skyscrapers, and communities, all by pushing beyond meaningless information and giving things meaning by taking action. And each action builds on the last and leap-frogs the previous. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
The brain makes sense of the senses.
The brain makes meaning from patterns of information. Patterns enable us to predict. Our collective predictions create our ecology. And we become defined by our interactions with our ecology. We conform or we rebel.
Ecology simply means the interactive relationship between things and the environment in which they exist. MINDS MATCH THEIR ECOLOGY.
Our Ecology shapes our brains which changes our behavior, which in turn shapes our environments.
"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."
Winston Churchill
Our Ecology and the resulting perceptions that ensue become our REALITY. Fortunately, we have restless minds with a capacity for curiosity and novelty to create and adapt.
Our past determines how we will think and behave in the future. Either to conform or to rebel. We have evolved to evolve and are adapted to adapt.
The more we engage with the world, the richer our history of response will be, and the more useful our response will be able.
We are defined by our interactions and our ecology.
In this way we continually redefine our normality.
We become what we think about!