3 ms·
Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if our fundamental conception of sensation as a blank canvas slowly filled with positive contents is wrong, and rather th
by Nav_Panel 5y ago
Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if our fundamental conception of sensation as a blank canvas slowly filled with positive contents is wrong, and rather that perception involves the apprehension of difference against some "basic" recursive pattern.
I tend to notice this more aurally, in the sonic experience within a highly focused state, including spending time on social media (not silent! quite noisy, but I am not actively aware of it in most cases), and also the intense experience of hitting the stop button mid-song; the silence hits very hard.
Seems Fristonian, in that if the brain is a prediction machine across time, then the underlying predictive pattern would be fractal, or at least highly self-similar to immediate past experience. The intensity of the hard stop (and similarly the annoyance of transient sounds like car horns) is in the predictive failure, which draws your attention. If this is desirable, we call it "interesting".
- nemosaltat 5y agoYou’ve beautifully articulated a feeling I’ve had for most of my life. In the Alvin Maker (historical fantasy) series, Orson Scott Card describes a phenomenon he calls the _greensong_. It’s a sort of pervading communion the first peoples have with nature, and white settlers not only can’t connect with it, but exist as a palpable disturbance to those who can. I’ve often felt like nearly _everything_ is signal, and my day-to-day experience is actually noise. That sense has been heightened on the occasions I’ve used hallucinogenics.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoYes! And if you consider the oscillatory nature of the brain, it is awfully easy for a massive set of weakly coupled oscillators to produce highly patterned nonlinear effects. We usually hold these things in control by virtue of our familiarity with them. But when they shift into some different oscillatory modes, the novel patterns become apprehensible. For instance: Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Kringelbach, M. L., Deco, G., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Scientific reports, 7(1), 1-18.
- Nav_Panel 5y agoAh, Carhart-Harris! His paper with Karl Friston, "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics" (2019) really stuck with me. Very interested in harmonic interpretation, thank you for sharing.