Deviate Read online

  Copyright

  This ebook contains backwards text, text captured as art, and other effects. These are intentional.

  Copyright © 2017 by Beau Lotto

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: April 2017

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  ISBNs: 978-0-316-30019-3 (hardcover); 978-0-316-30017-9 (ebook)

  E3-20170328-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Introduction: The Lab of Misfits

  1: Being in Color

  2: Information Is Meaningless

  3: Making Sense of the Senses

  4: The Illusion of Illusions

  5: The Frog Who Dreamed of Being a Prince

  6: The Physiology of Assumptions

  7: Changing the Future Past

  8: Making the Invisible Visible

  9: Celebrate Doubt

  10: The Ecology of Innovation

  A Beginning: Why Deviate?

  More Praise for Deviate

  Notes

  Newsletters

  To perceive freely…

  Through tempest…

  Violence un-cast…

  With courageous doubt…

  A tilted self…

  Dedicated to those who walk tilted.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All knowing begins with a question. And a question begins with a “quest” (to state the obvious), as does life. At the core of living, then, is the courage to move, to step with doubt but step nonetheless (sometimes off a cliff, which is a less good step). Fortunately, no one steps alone (except that last one). My shuffles expressed here were and are enabled by the courage of others who in different ways enable me to live: My deviant Mum and Padre and Janet, my four mad sisters, my gorgeous gremlins Zanna, Misha and Theo, and my essential and beautiful (co-)explorer and creator Isabel. All incredibly colorful people who have shown me new ways of seeing, sometimes against my will (sorry), always to my benefit eventually. They are “my why,” my foundation for attempting to see freely, and the motivation to support others in their attempt to do so.

  I thank my teachers (and all teachers more generally). Most of our life happens without us there, since most of our perceptions were seeded by, if not out-right inherited from, others. Of particular importance to me have been the perceptions of one of the world’s leading neuroscientists Dale Purves, who was the initiator and distiller of my way of thinking and being in science and the science of perception. A mentor in the truest sense. Dale, along with Richard Gregory, Marian Diamond, Joseph Campbell, Houston Smith and Carl Sagan and their deviating-ilk reveal in action that true science (and creatively-critical-thinking in general) is a way of being that can transform. They are teachers who show us how to look (not what to look at). Teachers like Mrs Stuber at Interlake, Mrs Kinigle-Wiggle and Marshmellow, Mr Groom and Orlando at Cherry Crest, thank you. I also thank my core collaborators (teachers of a different kind): Isabel Behncke, who has expanded, opened and grounded my knowledge personally and academically in essential ways (including the different grounds of Chile the kelp-beds to lake-beds), Rich Clarke, who has been core to the lab’s activities and ideas since its inception, Lars Chittka, who taught me how to train bees, Dave Strudwick, who was essential to creating the lab’s science education programme… and my diversity of PhD and Masters students in neuroscience, computer science, design, architecture, theatre, installation art, and music, such as David Maulkin, Daniel Hulme, Udi Schlessinger and Ilias Berstrom, who became experts in areas that I was not, and in doing so complexified the lab and my thinking in essential ways.

  I also thank my highly engaged editors Mauro, Bea and Paul, my brilliant agent and friend Doug Abrams (whose ambition and impact in publishing is inspiring), and my tremendous support-writer Aaron Shulman without whom this 20-year project would never have been seen by me, much less anyone else. Together we struggled to innovate; i.e., to balance creativity and efficiency (or more accurately, they struggled to balance me patiently).

  And I thank you. One of the most challenging things we can do is to step into uncertainty. I conceived of Deviate as an experiment in book-form, a place to share my necessarily limited understanding of perception as well as my speculations and opinions (inherited and seeded) in the hope—and I can only hope—that you would know less at the end than you think you know now, and in doing so understand more. In nature form (or change) comes from failure, not success. The brain—like life—does not search to live, but to not die. Which makes success an accident of what failure leaves behind when one is thoughtfully deluded enough to walk tilted (long) enough.

  The only true voyage of discovery…

  [would be] to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.

  —Marcel Proust

  INTRODUCTION

  The Lab of Misfits

  When you open your eyes, do you see the world as it really is? Do we see reality?

  Humans have been asking themselves this question for thousands of years. From the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave in The Republic to Morpheus offering Neo the red pill or the blue bill in The Matrix, the notion that what we see might not be what is truly there has troubled and tantalized us. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we can never have access to the Ding an sich, the unfiltered “thing-in-itself ” of objective reality. Great minds of history have taken up this perplexing question again and again. They all had theories, but now neuroscience has an answer.

  The answer is that we don’t see reality.

  The world exists. It’s just that we don’t see it. We do not experience the world as it is because our brain didn’t evolve to do so. It’s a paradox of sorts: Your brain gives you the impression that your perceptions are objectively real, yet the sensory processes that make perception possible actually separate you from ever accessing that reality directly. Our five senses are like a keyboard to a computer—they provide the means for information from the world to get in, but they have very little to do with what is then experienced in perception. They are in essence just mechanical media, and so play only a limited role in what we perceive. In fact, in terms of the sheer number of neural connections, just 10 percent of the information our brains use to see comes from our eyes. The rest comes from other parts of our brains, and this other 90 percent is in large part what this book is about. Perception derives not just from our five
senses but from our brain’s seemingly infinitely sophisticated network that makes sense of all the incoming information. Using perceptual neuroscience—but not only neuroscience—we will see why we don’t perceive reality, then explore why this can lead to creativity and innovation at work, in love, at home, or at play. I’ve written the book to be what it describes: a manifestation of the process of seeing differently.

  But first, why does any of this really matter to you? Why might you need to deviate from the way you currently perceive? After all, it feels like we see reality accurately… at least most of the time. Clearly our brain’s model of perception has served our species well, allowing us to successfully navigate the world and its ever-shifting complexity, from our days as hunter-gatherers on the savannah to our current existence paying bills on our smartphones. We’re able to find food and shelter, hold down a job, and build meaningful relationships. We have built cities, launched astronauts into space, and created the Internet. We must be doing something right, so… who cares that we don’t see reality?

  Perception matters because it underpins everything we think, know, and believe—our hopes and dreams, the clothes we wear, the professions we choose, the thoughts we have, and the people whom we trust… and don’t trust. Perception is the taste of an apple, the smell of the ocean, the enchantment of spring, the glorious noise of the city, the feeling of love, and even conversations about the impossibility of love. Our sense of self, our most essential way of understanding existence, begins and ends with perception. The death that we all fear is less the death of the body and more the death of perception, as many of us would be quite happy to know that after “bodily death” our ability to engage in perception of the world around us continued. This is because perception is what allows us to experience life itself… indeed to see it as alive. Yet most of us don’t know how or why perceptions work, or how or why our brain evolved to perceive the way it does. This is why the implications of the way the human brain evolved to perceive are both profound and deeply personal.

  Our brain is a physical embodiment of our ancestors’ perceptual reflexes shaped through the process of natural selection, combined with our own reflexes as well as those of our culture in which we are embedded. These in turn have been influenced by the mechanisms of development and learning, which results in seeing only what helped us to survive in the past—and nothing else. We carry all of this empirical history with us and project it out into the world around us. All of our forebears’ good survival choices exist within us, as do our own (the mechanisms and strategies that would have led to bad perceptions are selected out, a process that continues to this day, every day).

  Yet if the brain is a manifestation of our history, how is it ever possible to step outside the past in order to live and create differently in the future? Fortunately, the neuroscience of perception—and indeed evolution itself—offers us a solution. The answer is essential because it will lead to future innovations in thought and behavior in all aspects of our lives, from love to learning. What is the next greatest innovation?

  It’s not a technology.

  It’s a way of seeing.

  Humans have the wild and generative gift of being able to see their lives and affect them just by reflecting on the process of perception itself. We can see ourselves see. That is what this book is fundamentally about: seeing your see or perceiving your perception, which is arguably the most essential step in seeing differently. By becoming aware of the principles by which your perceptual brain works, you can become an active participant in your own perceptions and in this way change them in the future.

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Alice follows a white rabbit down a hole and ends up in a world in which fantastical things happen. She grows in size; time is eternally stopped for the Mad Hatter at 6 p.m.; the Cheshire Cat’s grin floats in the air, sans the cat. Alice must navigate this bizarre new environment and at the same time maintain her sense of self, no easy task for anyone, let alone a child. The book Alice in Wonderland underscores the virtue of being adaptive when confronting shifting circumstances. From the perspective of neuroscience, however, there is a much more powerful lesson: We’re all like Alice all the time—our brains must process strange new information arising from unpredictable experiences every single day, and provide us with useful responses—except that we didn’t have to drop through the rabbit hole. We’re already deep inside it.

  My goal in Deviate is to reveal the hidden wonderland of your own perception to you as my more than 25 years of research have revealed it to me. You don’t have to be a so-called “science person.” Although I’m a neuroscientist, I’m not just interested in the brain only, since neuroscience is so much bigger than just the brain. When neuroscience is applied outside the disciplines it is traditionally associated with—such as chemistry, physiology, and medicine—the possibilities are not just immense, but fantastically unpredictable. Neuroscience—when defined more broadly—has the potential to impact everything from apps to art, web design to fashion design, education to communication, and perhaps most fundamentally, your personal life. You’re the only one seeing what you see, so perception is ultimately personal. Understanding of the brain (and its relationship to the world around you) can affect anything, and lead to startling deviations.

  Once you begin to see perceptual neuroscience this way, as I did several years ago, it becomes hard to stay in the lab… or at least the more conventional, staid conception of what a “lab” is. So, a decade ago I began redirecting my energies toward creating brain-changing, science-based experiences for the public: experiment as experience… even theater. The theme of one of my first installations at a leading science museum was Alice in Wonderland. The exhibit, much like Lewis Carroll’s strange, topsy-turvy novel, took visitors through illusions intended to challenge and enrich their view of human perception. This first exhibit—which I created with the scientist Richard Gregory, a hero in perception who shaped much of what I (and we) think about the perceiving brain—grew into many other settings, all of them based on the belief that to create spaces for understanding we need to consider not only how we see, but why we see what we do. To this end, I founded the Lab of Misfits, a public place open to anyone where I could conduct science “in its natural habitat,” a playful and rule-breaking ecology of creativity. This was most dramatically the case when we took up residency in the Science Museum in London.

  My Lab of Misfits has enabled me to bring together primatologists, dancers, choreographers, musicians, composers, children, teachers, mathematicians, computer scientists, investors, behavioral scientists, and of course neuroscientists in a place where concepts and principles unite, where the emphasis is on innovation, and where we passionately investigate things we care about. We’ve had an official “Keeper of the Crayons” and “Head Player” (not that kind of player—as far as we know). We’ve published papers on nonlinear computation and dance, bee behavior and architecture, visual music, and the evolution of plant development. We’ve created the world’s first Immersive Messaging app that enables gifting in physical space using augmented reality, which allow people to re-engage with the world. We’ve initiated a new way to interact with the public called NeuroDesign, which combines those who are brilliant at telling stories with those who understand the nature of the stories the brain desires. We have created an education platform that, with the raison d’être of encouraging courage, compassion, and creativity, doesn’t teach children about science but makes them scientists, and has resulted in the youngest published scientists in the world (and the youngest main-stage TED speaker). Many of the ideas in Deviate were created, prototyped, and embodied through experience in this physical and conceptual “Lab of Misfits” space. This means the book is also a product of all these misfits, the interactions between them, and even more significantly, our interactions with historic and contemporary misfits outside the lab.

  This brings me to a key theme in the pages ahead: that perception isn’t an isolated operation in
our brains, but part of an ongoing process inside an ecology, by which I mean the relation of things to the things around them, and how they influence each other. Understanding a whirlpool isn’t about understanding water molecules; it’s about understanding the interaction of those molecules. Understanding what it is to be human is about understanding the interactions between our brain and body, and between other brains and bodies, as well as with the world at large. Hence life is an ecology, not an environment. Life—and what we perceive—lives in what I call “the space between.” My lab, and all my research on perception, draws on this inherent interconnectedness, which is where biology, and indeed life itself, lives.

  Now I have started all over again and built my lab into a book—hopefully a delightfully misfit one, shot through with deviations. This creates a sense of danger, not just for me but for you as well, since together we will need to question basic assumptions, such as whether or not we see reality. Stepping into such uncertainty isn’t easy or simple. On the contrary, all brains are deathly afraid of uncertainty—and for good reason. To change a historical reflex will have unknown consequences. “Not knowing” is an evolutionarily bad idea. If our ancestors paused because they weren’t sure whether the dark shape in front of them was a shadow or a predator, well, it was already too late. We evolved to predict. Why are all horror films shot in the dark? Think of the feeling you often have when walking through a familiar forest at night as compared to during the day. At night you can’t see what’s around you. You’re uncertain. It’s frightening, much like the constant “firsts” life presents us with—the first day of school, first dates, the first time giving a speech. We don’t know what’s going to happen, so these situations cause our bodies and our minds to react.

  Uncertainty is the problem that our brains evolved to solve.