Brain Musings Part 2: Brains are Lazy

When I was younger, I first heard the racial slur, “they all look alike,” with respect to black people. I knew it was supposed to be an insult, but honestly, I didn’t get it. To me, they were just as distinguishable as whites. I could tell that the phrase was insulting, but who would come up with that? I mean, if you wanted to insult someone, I’m sure you could think of something better. I chalked it up to people being stupid and filed it away in my head. Fast-forward several years later – first quarter of college. There was an Indian guy on my hall who would buy alcohol with using an ID that belonged to his older brother. Someone asked him if the person at the convenience store ever noticed that the picture wasn’t of him, and he laughed and replied that, “We all look the same to them.” (I’ve since forgotten who “them” referred to.) It was then that I started to learn that the “look alike” phenomenon happened with other races as well, although I still couldn’t figure it out. Later, I actually caught it happening with myself when I realized that I was having trouble recalling certain Asian faces that I had been in contact with. I’m not saying that I thought they looked alike; I just noticed an inability to recall defining characteristics. This troubled me, but I didn’t really know what to do about it, so I just had to file that away as well.

Now fast-forward one more time. I’m reading an article on a study about people’s ability to differentiate sounds (yes, I’m a nerd, deal with it!). This study focused on sounds from two different languages (Japanese and English, I think). Now, many of the sounds people can make are used in both languages, but there are some sounds that are only used in one language and some that are only used in the other. Scientists found that if there were two very similar sounds that came from the overlapping region, speakers of both languages could differentiate them, but if the sounds came from only one of the languages, only speakers of that language could tell the difference between the sounds. The speakers of the other language could not tell the difference! And then everything began falling into place.

I know that was a round-about lead-in, but sometimes how one reaches a conclusion is as important as the conclusion itself. I’ll write more on that later. For now, the simplest way to start is to state the following: the brain recognizes and categorizes patterns. With respect to our cognitive capability, that really sums it up. To put it another way, the brain recognizes input. The main idea that I want to convey here is that the brain, while very good at this job, can also be very lazy – it only does as much work as it has to. When the brain gets some input, the first thing it tries to do is recognize it. Imagine that your brain has lots of buckets for all of the stuff it has experienced in life. This bucket is for John; that bucket is for Sally. The bucket over here is for couches. You get the idea. When the brain gets input, if there’s some feature it is unfamiliar with, that feature stands out greatly and is much more likely to be used as the defining characteristic used to decide in what bucket to place the input, because the obvious defining characteristic overshadows the less obvious ones. The consequence of this is that if you only get a few examples of something that has the same general features, the brain will put all of those in the same bucket. It’s like if you were tasked with categorizing 100 marbles that were all varying shades of red, but three of them were different shades of blue. While you may have several categories for slightly different shades of red, you’ll probably just lump the three blue marbles together, even though they may be as different from each other as the red categories are from each other. It will not be until you see many blue marbles that you decide to split them up into different categories as well. In the same way, it is not until your brain sees many examples of input with that general feature that it needs to categorize more subtly. In effect, your brain becomes accustomed to the more obvious feature, and it is only then that it perceives the other less obvious features.

With the marble analogy, you are making a conscious decision to separate categories or not, but you do not have this same conscious control over what your brain does. To be perfectly blunt, you are at the mercy of the categories that it chooses. If your brain decides to put two different things in the same bucket, you perceive them as being the same thing, just as the brains of English speakers categorized similar sounds from the Japanese language as being the same sound. Even though two things are different, you will perceive them to be the same thing. This is why, when you hear your first few examples of a new genre of music, the samples all sound the same, but later, after you have listened a while, you can pick out subtleties you did not hear before. This is why a new culture’s food may all taste alike the first time. And this is why faces of another ethnicity can all look alike if you are unpracticed at differentiating them. Additionally, from this we can tell why someone who is very practiced can differentiate and notice small features that most others overlook; their brains have learned not to pay attention to the more obvious features that overwhelm the smaller features for the non-practiced. Essentially, after enough practice, it’s like you are seeing through a filter – much like how we may look at the sun through filters to remove most of the light so that the finer details can be viewed. With practice, fine details stand out as much as the general details used to.

I’ll end this entry here and continue on with some consequences of this stuff next time, but first I want to throw out the general idea to which all this has been building: even though we may all look at the same world, we actually perceive it in different ways. Put two people in the same place at the same time, and they will see, hear, smell, taste, and feel different things. If the world, to us, is defined by what we perceive, then to an extent, we all live in different worlds. That’s an absolutely fascinating idea to me, and I’ll leave you to mull it over for a while.