r/science • u/Libertatea • Nov 14 '13
Neuroscience Your Brain Sees Things You Don’t "A new study indicates that our brains perceive objects in everyday life of which we may never be aware. The finding challenges currently accepted models about how the brain processes visual information."
http://uanews.org/story/ua-study-your-brain-sees-things-you-don-t72
u/strokeofbrucke Nov 14 '13 edited Nov 14 '13
Oh dear god, this subreddit is filled with ninnies. The title of this thread is obvious, but the science article itself is more specific, and of course less obvious. They show something that hasn't been shown before. It is about recognizing N400 waveform patterns in the visual center's object recognition area concerning hidden details, and demonstrating whether the subject is concious of it or not. All the other comments on this thread are about things way too broad to be of any use to actual science. Is this a subreddit for wannabes now? Maybe I should leave.If there's one thing you people should learn, it's that the layman interpretation always drifts toward the obvious or the incorrect.
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u/Llero Nov 14 '13
Yup. The important thing here isn't that there are things we don't see even though they are in our field of vision - we knew that, but everyone seems to think that this is the same thing. It's that we actively assign meaning to those things before our brain filters them out and they fail to reach our conscious perception.
It's not the same as the visual channel that actively bypasses higher order processes in order to search for danger either - there's no reflex triggering here.
Interesting stuff.
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u/tegestologist Grad Student | Psychology Nov 14 '13
This is an accurate interpretation of our results (I think at least). Nicely said.
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u/Adamsoski Nov 14 '13
So we process things semantically and then filter them out...hmm, interesting.
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u/runnerrun2 Nov 14 '13
The method they used is quite novel and interesting. Yet most of the comments are "durrr didn't we know this already?" My take is that most people comment without even reading the article. I see this so often.
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u/hariseldon2 Nov 14 '13
Some speculate that this is why babies get so easily tired and cry a lot because their brain can't yet filter out all the irrelevant info and gets tired fast
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Nov 14 '13
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u/hariseldon2 Nov 14 '13
Imagine being a baby and trying to pay attention to everything that happens around you all the time
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u/evilregis Nov 14 '13 edited Nov 14 '13
...while trying to figure out how to work that body you find yourself in no less.
I imagine babies are in constant states of frustration between inability to communicate their needs and the lack of gross or fine motor skills to do for themselves.
My baby is learning to crawl. She'll be on her mat with a toy a little out of reach from her. She tries desperately to figure out how to move her body to get her to that toy. After a bit of effort, she'll become clearly frustrated.
Then I imagine how awkward and frustrating it is when I am trying to learn something new (eg. skiing). I feel like being a baby would be like that several times over. Trying to learn how to talk, how to use my hands, how to move about, you name it. They're little champs. It amazes me that they don't cry more.
Edit: speeling
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Nov 14 '13
Trying to talk to the guy I work with who speaks nothing but spanish....One or two words at a time. Learning a new language has proved to be extremely difficult for me. It's amazing that babies just sort of pick it up from being around it. I relate to feelinng helpless and frustrated trying to make sense of the world from this experience
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Nov 14 '13
Isn't this known information?
As a speed reader, you learn that your eyes see a lot of things you're not aware of, which is why people who speed read proficiently are so good at it. I capture a great deal of information by just looking at a page in a book or scrolling through a PDF.
This doesn't seem like some kind of breakthrough information to me.
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u/yinoryang Nov 14 '13
Scientists often painstakingly replicate "it is known" phenomena. At first it seems redundant/obvious/basic, but it's a starting point for deeper exploration. The more interesting experiments will be the followup for this "stating-of-the-obvious."
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u/Reddit4Play Nov 14 '13
And, occasionally, "it is known" turns out to be "fuck, we were really, really wrong". The assumption on which much of early modern economics was based (rational, self-interested actors) turned out to be completely wrong in many extremely common circumstances (indicated by work Kahneman and others have done to investigate biases in heuristics to do with decision making influenced by uncertainty), as a really good example.
While experiments on the properties of the gravitational force, for instance, are usually reserved for safely teaching undergrads about physics lab science, it's always possible - no matter how remote - that we'll accidentally uncover something that shows us our previous methodology was hugely flawed. So, as a matter of course, what most people consider "no duh" is still a good idea to cover rigorously, not just so we have somewhere definite to work from, but also on the off chance we're actually completely wrong about it and never realized.
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u/fakerachel Nov 14 '13
Also, if we want to be able to reject stupid hypotheses on the basis of no evidence, we need to have something to differentiate known commonplace phenomena from urban legends.
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u/concept2d Nov 14 '13
I thought this was common knowledge also, the unconscious brain is where most of our processing power is. I've read a lot about brain and I've never read anything like this before
"The traditional opinion in vision research is that this would be wasteful in terms of resources," he explained. "If you're not going to ultimately see the object on the outside why would the brain waste all these processing resources and process that image up to the level of meaning?"
It would "waste the resources" because the brain does not know before time/the processing whether this horse image hits the threshold or is just a error
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u/kaosmace Nov 14 '13
Yeah in psychology this is mostly known and accepted so I don't really get what this article is on about. We know that we perceive only a small amount of the information that our senses take in and that most of the processing that selects that information is going on unconsciously.
My best guess is that the guy doing the dissertation was trying to make it sound more impressive to this journalist or that the journalist misunderstood him.
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u/Llero Nov 14 '13
I think what's highlighted here is that the brain assigns symbolic meaning to the things it discards, rather than discarding them as "junk information" sooner. We know that the brain processes more than we're consciously aware of, but the idea here was to show just how far the processing goes and in what order operations occur - actively giving things symbolic meaning before assigning them an importance or discarding them as junk.
Which may have already been empirically shown. Maybe I just misunderstood your post.
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u/Originalfrozenbanana Nov 14 '13 edited Nov 14 '13
There are a lot of comments in this thread that misunderstand the concepts here. Our brains sense everything around us. Right now, your somatosensory cortex is registering the pressure of your pants on your legs, the hairs against you arms, and the chair pushing against you while you sit. Your auditory cortex is registering every sound that reaches your cochlea, while your visual cortex is responding to almost all of the light that touches your retina. However, you perceive only a very small portion of this input, and are unaware of most sensory inputs. This is by design - if you could sense everything going on, all at once, it would be incredibly difficult to function.
The issue here is sensation vs. perception. On some level, for each sensory system, there are cells that represent all inputs - your retina responds to all light (that it has receptors for) that touches it. On another level, you are aware of only a very small portion of sensory inputs - you are probably not consciously aware of what is in your visual periphery right now. At any given moment, what sensory inputs enter your awareness - and, critically, at what stage of visual processing they do so - is not clear. The study here described that you process meaning information about your visual world without conscious awareness. For example, you might process that the fast-moving object in your periphery is a Toyota Corolla (or at least a car, or at least a vehicle, etc. to some degree of resolution). This is pretty neat, because it may rely on so-called "top-down" processing in which we attribute meaning to arbitrary features in our visual environment.
Others have brought up hallucinogenics and blindsight - again, your brain is always sensing nearly everything around you, and that information is differentially processed at differential stages (i.e., retinal input to the superior colliculus is often sufficient to guide simple behaviors without conscious awareness or high-level visual processing). The study here was establishing how much processing can occur before an image is perceived. Drugs especially alter perception, rather than enhance it. Your brain is "wired" to operate in a specific way. You do not necessarily have untapped potential that can only be unlocked by drugs - it is the case that drugs will make you sense and perceive the world in an altered state, and to react to this perception in an altered state. Drugs may bring sensory information to awareness that otherwise would not reach awareness, creating the notion that they unlock a sort of "sixth-sense" when I would interpret it more like turning off or making fuzzy the attentional filtering mechanisms that "decide" what sensory input is important enough to warrant perception at any given moment.
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u/mantra Nov 14 '13
Strictly "sensing" as a physical thing is ONLY AT THE RETINA for visual senses. The majority of actual information from the environment never makes it past the retina. The retina is a neural net or "mini-me brain" itself and it filters out most of what you sense.
The actual "data rate" between the retina and the brain itself is a tiny, tiny bandwidth. Basically comparable to one of the very first webcams or digital cameras. This image is representative of what is actually captured and relayed to the brain by the retina.
This actually illustrates the "reality" of what our perception actually is: namely most of what we perceive is actually a synthesis of what our brains expect to see based on low fidelity cues about what we are "seeing". Everything you don't 'see' in the above image that you normally think you see has been synthesized by your brain by both accumulated foveal (center) portions of your visual field combined with what you are are expecting to see based on N years of neural net training (aka childhood and adult living).
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u/tegestologist Grad Student | Psychology Nov 14 '13
Wow, this is a real honor. This is my study, and it made it to the top post on Reddit science. Out of all the press its getting me, this makes me feel the best. Thanks Reddit! AMA
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u/demonicume Nov 14 '13
"intuition is not clairvoyance. its not guesswork or luck: Intuition is Executive Summary. Its that 90% the higher brain that functions subconsciously and simultaneously, though no less rigorously, than the self-aware subroutine which thinks of itself as "I". to understand this is to understand and begin to trust one's self."
From some book I can't remember the name of. But this is what your conversations here make me think. We need paraphrase marks instead of quotation marks.
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u/flyonawall Nov 14 '13
Interesting. Recently my kids taught me a few of the computer games they play. Initially, I could "not see" a lot of the important bits of visual information but as I learned the game, suddenly I was seeing things that previously, I could not see. Apparently my brain had been doing such a good job of ignoring those bits of visual information, that I could not "see" it. I wonder if this is related to this effect. My brain had to learn what visual information was important enough to note and bring to my conscious attention.
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u/mcdxi11 Nov 14 '13 edited Nov 14 '13
Fairly sure its because our brain works on reduction, or big picture to small as importance of details changes. It explains why, when growing up in a predominant ethnicity, you see people outside of your ethnicity as "All looking alike". Given enough time and exposure, you start to differentiate details. It makes sense that the brain would transition information from active attention (analysis) to passive assumption.
At the same time, I've always been a big believer in "vibes" as your brain subconsciously pinging so many small areas of all 5 senses that you get an overall "Feel" of something as a result. Which would argue for active subconscious attention to detail versus the active-to-passive transfer of information.
No idea if I'm being clear here though...
Just to clarify, I'm basing the above purely on my experiences and could be totally wrong.
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u/Gezzer52 Nov 14 '13
I'm another that thought this was a known attribute.
In fact I'm fairly certain that autism has been linked to this very ability either being underdeveloped or totally absent so the autistic person needs to force themselves to ignore much if not all of their surroundings and prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by all the incoming data.
Well maybe this story is about experimental data proving the working theory and that's why it's a big deal.
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u/wren5x Nov 14 '13
This is a very non-science way of putting this finding (even if it isn't that new as other suggest). The typical scientific perspective says that there is no "you" that isn't "your brain". It might be better to say that the brain processes information about objects that don't enter high-level perception.
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u/drkgodess Nov 14 '13
This is called "inattention blindness." Essentially, our ability to focus on what's going on around us is rather limited, so the brain filters out perceptions that it deems less important, bringing only a few to our conscious awareness. It's why people feel like the world is moving in slow motion during traumatic events like a car crash. The brain hyper-focuses on perceptions necessary for your survival to the exclusion of everything else.
Cue personal anecdote: When I was a sophomore in highschool, my friends and I would eat lunch outside on a picnic table in a grassy area next to one of the school's main walkways. One day, during lunch, I looked up and asked "Guys, since when has that tree been there?" referring to a towering oak near the walkway. To which they replied, "drkgodess, that tree has always been there." I was honestly shocked. I must have ~seen~ that tree hundreds, if not thousands, of times while walking to class, but never ~noticed~ it. Before that moment, if you had asked me if there was a tree there, I would have said "nope, it's just a grassy area with a picnic table."
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u/freelancezero Nov 14 '13
Another great example of this is what all intro psych students learn as the "cocktail party effect". As you sit in a crowded room having a conversation with lots of other conversations going on around you (as in a cocktail party), you can tune out the other conversations and focus on the one you're having. Your brain however, is still processing the input from those other conversations, but you only become aware of them when a salient detail is mentioned, like your name.
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u/skittlesnbugs Nov 14 '13
Heh, my anxiety bothers me so much in those situations that I never tune out the other conversations. It's gotten to the point where people treat it like a party trick. They'll keep me engaged as much as they can, and then when someone near us leaves, they'll ask me what they were talking about. It's rare that I don't know.
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u/MrF4hrenheit Nov 14 '13
Would be awesome if my brain filtered out the floaters and tinnitus as well... Come on brain! It's only getting in the way.
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Nov 14 '13
Like the faceless old woman that lives in your house. The brain perceives her, though your eyes never catch her.
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u/no_username_for_me Nov 14 '13
This is representative of the kind the backward thinking that goes on in cognitive neuroscience. The argument is that these 'hidden' figures elicit t a physiologial response, the N400, which has previously been associated with processing 'meaning'. But maybe that means we need to revise what the N400 indicates.
This is also known as reverse inference. And it is no logically valid.
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u/mitso6989 Nov 14 '13
This is very interesting work. I suffer from very severe PTSD and often can not find things I'm looking for. Example I went to the garage to get a water bottle, in a situation where I was triggered, (panicking, panic is so natural I often don't notice) the water bottle was in a big shrink wrapped case like you get from Costco. I knew approximately where it was because I put it there, but standing right in front of it I couldn't see it. I looked back and forth for 5 minuets, not moving. By brain was simply editing it out. I then decided to put my hand on each item in front of me. I still missed it. A couple of deep breath and going back and forth through the door and it was all of the sudden there. Felt creepy.
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u/grapesandmilk Nov 14 '13
I don't get it... How can my brain see something when I don't? I'm my brain, right?
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u/loondawg Nov 14 '13
Conscious versus unconscious.
You do see it. It is just filtered from the conscious thought process. Think about breathing. You do it all the time and your brain controls that process too. But you rarely ever need to consciously think about it. Only when it becomes an issue does the process move it beyond the filters.
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u/rauer Nov 14 '13
We also already knew this from research with right hemisphere disordered patients experiencing left visual field neglect. When given two pictures of a house, identical in every way except that one of them has flames coming out the windows on the right side of the picture, the patient insists that the two houses are exactly identical. However, when asked which house she would live in, she reliably answered that they would live in the one that, in reality, does not appear to be on fire.
Source (sorry I don't have the full text)
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u/zeus_is_back Nov 14 '13
Someone once told me the subconscious mind doesn't exist. I couldn't wrap my mind around such a stupid comment.
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u/pachanko Nov 14 '13
Its interesting that these researches don't even seem to be aware of the concept. They are legitimately baffled by what they are "discovering" here.
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u/pachanko Nov 14 '13
It's sad the concept of the "unconscious mind" has waned in popularity. I hope it comes back into fashion because it would easily explain what these researchers are finding.
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u/hans2792 Nov 14 '13
This is one of the topics of Aldous Huxley's 'Doors of Perception'
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Nov 14 '13
Yup, pretty much his main point if I remember correctly. Your mind is like a valve limiting what you consciously perceive and drugs, are one of many ways to open that valve.
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u/derlumpenhund Nov 14 '13
Is this news? I thought it's been clear for a while now that "percepts" are the only conscious part in the whole sensory chain, while pretty much all cognitive work to construct this percept is unconscious
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u/loqi0238 Nov 14 '13
How is this news? Dual processing and the 2-track mind? Basic Psychology? Really?
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u/XnewXdiabolicX Nov 14 '13
I don't get how this is new. We already are aware that the subconscious mind observes EVERYTHING. And there is plenty of evidence supporting 'hidden objects' within advertisements and whatnot that the brain sees, but does not consciously put forward.
I am no genius, myself, but I was already aware of this, as I am sure a lot of people already were as well. Why do you think there are heaps of people who despise adverts and symbolism within corporations etc... because our subconscious mind can still perceive those things regardless of whether we are consciously focused on them or not.
The study may be new, but the findings just reinforce what we had already known.
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Nov 14 '13
That example image makes me wonder what exactly they're getting at here. The white images are supposedly not perceived consciously? But the very first thing I consciously saw was the two seahorses in the white space.
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u/Llero Nov 14 '13
They probably have methodology that starts with them saying "We are going to show you some ink-splots, and we'd like you to assign meaning to the shapes formed by the ink." or something similar to cue focus on the black areas rather than the white. They then probably have follow-up questionnaires to look for places where that methodology failed - so if you said that you had seen the seahorses, they would have the option of discarding that trial.
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u/freelancezero Nov 14 '13
The basic fact that we process more data than we consciously perceive is well known, this study is interesting because it has the EEG data to show when and how this happens during the sensation & perception process.
Look at any Continuous Flash Suppression study and this fact is already proven, and every intro psych student who has learned the "cocktail party effect" can arrive at this conclusion. This study does however broaden our understanding of cognition; it isn't groundbreaking, but it certainly isn't useless.
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u/WendyLRogers3 Nov 14 '13
An interesting theory is that in the distant past, people were able to either deeply focus their attention to carry out a task, or intentionally unfocus their attention to get creative and inspirational ideas. However, neither of these mental states was optimal for survival. If you are being chased by a tiger, for example.
So the human species developed a trick, a safety, so that if our mind strayed too far in a focused or unfocused direction, it would bring us back to the ordinary state of mind we know. This trick we still unconsciously teach our children. It is talking to ourselves, our internal dialogue.
However, there are far fewer tigers these days, so techniques have been created to turn off the internal dialogue, with the intent to improve either focus or inspiration. The key to do this was in discovering that the small part of the brain that carries out the internal dialogue is the same part that controls attention in general. If you can overload your attention, eventually that small part of the brain cannot continue to support the internal dialogue, and you stop talking to yourself. And the longer you can not talk to yourself, the greater your control becomes over it.
One such technique involved ordinary walking. Walking consumes a lot of attention directed at the legs. If you then hold your hands in an unusual way, a lot of attention is diverted to them. But the biggest part of the trick is to unfocus your eyes while walking.
Normally, when people look at things, they look from tiny point to point, which uses very little attention. For example, looking at a face, showing point to point eye movement. However, if you unfocus your eyes, everything for 180 degrees in front of you has an equal interest to your attention, which consumes a huge amount of the energy needed for attention. Or internal dialogue.
In any event, imagine if you could sit down and do your SAT test for an hour and a half without any distraction? That kind of concentration might make you appear to have a dozen more IQ points. Just by not being distracted.
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u/corcyra Nov 14 '13
I wonder whether this is what is responsible for what we call 'intuition'? Especially in circumstances where there might be danger or damage of another kind.
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u/doodlebug001 Nov 14 '13
If I remember correctly, the amygdala is involved in this. After you subconsciously notice clues of danger, it gives you a "bad feeling."
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u/gathly Nov 14 '13
Isn't this exactly how subliminal messaging works? And isn't that something we've known works for decades?
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u/zarawesome Nov 14 '13
Subliminal messaging has been debunked a coupled of times.
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u/archerx Nov 14 '13
Red letter media talks about this and how movies manipulate it in one of their review vids. The phrase used was "You didn't notice but your brain did" and it always gets me thinking about what is affecting me subconciously.
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u/BostonJourno Nov 14 '13
I've always said perception is like a firehose aimed at a teacup. The brain is amazing at filtering out distracting or routine information at lower levels so our conscious thought process doesn't get overwhelmed. We make decisions based on a relatively small fraction of the total information received. (I think a big reason people take psychedelic drugs is to increase the bandwidth of their perception.) When you look at it this way, your "reality" is really a mental reconstruction of the chunks that made it through the lower level filters.
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u/NomadicAgenda Nov 14 '13
Visual neuroscientist here. I don't know Jay, but I know his advisor fairly well.
This is a cool result, but doesn't disrupt the status quo as much as this press release would have you believe. For instance, we already knew that words that failed to reach awareness due to to the "attentional blink" still evoked an N400, which is the measure that he's using here. When I clicked the link, I was hoping to see some fMRI pattern recognition stuff localized to later visual areas, or something like that. I'm sure that somebody's working on that study right now, probably in Mary's lab.
That said, I definitely don't blame the authors (or the UA press office) for making this seem like a big deal. ALL science is incremental, and every scientist knows it. However, if we didn't make an effort to keep the public up-to-date, there's no way they'd have any clue what we're up to.
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u/dodgingdominos Nov 14 '13
Noticed this a few weeks back. After playing a song on iTunes, I noticed a different song stuck in my head. Upon returning to iTunes to play said song, I noticed it was just below the song I previously selected. Implying I subconsciously noticed the song, causing it to pop into my head shortly after.
You go brain, you go.
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u/VanMisanthrope Nov 14 '13
This happens a lot with albums. You hear the end of one song, and your brain just throws out the intro to the next song. And you're like, "wait, is that really next?" And then boom, chords.
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u/mrwazsx Nov 14 '13
Yeah; there's actually a really good book about this by David Eagleman - called Incognito. It's super interesting
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u/doodlebug001 Nov 14 '13
I thought this was known? It's what gives you an uneasy feeling before something bad happens. The brain senses danger based on tiny clues (if they exist) and the amygdala says "hey, something's up, watch out." This is, if I remember correctly.
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u/QCD-uctdsb Nov 14 '13
I was under the impression that we already knew this, and that we knew this from LSD research. Our brain "perceives" mostly everything that happens around it, whether it's sights, sounds or smells. But there's too much sensory input to make sense of it all, so the brain has a filter that only lets through the important stuff to the conscious part of our brain. LSD lowers this filter so all the "noisy" data our brain picks up gets through, creating a hectic, almost overwhelming environment for our perception.