Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 17

I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.

—CONFUCIUS

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, George Stratton, a graduate student who became one of his generation’s pre-eminent psychologists, conducted a simple yet curious experiment on his eyes. What would happen, he wondered, if the world appeared upside down? Glasses aim to correct vision. Stratton crafted glasses to distort his vision by inverting the world so that up became down, left became right. In one of his experiments, he wore the glasses for eight consecutive days. When he took them off, which was rarely, and mostly to sleep, he immediately put on a blindfold. In total, Stratton spent almost 90 hours peering at the world through his distorting lenses. The rest of the time he lived in darkness, as though blind.

Stratton’s experience began exactly as you would expect. He was clumsy and bumbled around. He experienced dizziness, headaches, and what he called a “nervous depression.” Ordinary tasks, such as pouring a glass of milk, had to be “cautiously worked out,” and he found “all but the simplest movements extremely fatiguing.”¹ He was less disoriented by the second day. His vision slowly adjusted and after the eight days, when the experiment concluded, the world appeared to him as normal.

This is known as the Stratton effect, and it’s a marvelous example of the brain’s adaptability. Stratton became so well adjusted to his topsy-turvy lenses that when he finally took them off, he faced the same problem: the world appeared to be flipped. Once again, he stumbled, grew dizzy, and used his left hand to reach for items to his right. And once again, his visual system adapted. A few days after removing the glasses, his vision was just as before.

Stratton’s curious experiment has been repeated many times with lenses that distort the world in different ways and with similar results. People experience nausea and clumsiness, slowly adapt, and if they wear the glasses long enough, the world stops looking weird. Hubert Dolezal, for example, attached inverted lenses to a football helmet during a five-week visit to a small village in Greece. Once he overcame the initial awkwardness, Dolezal adapted so well that he was able to bike, swim, and read.² Hundreds of similar experiments have been conducted over the years, including dozens of long-term experiments in Japan, where people have worn the glasses for as long as 21 days.³

That people can adapt to such a bizarre visual experience is surprising. Hence the hundreds of studies to explore the phenomenon. More surprising is that if the person remains stationary, they do not adapt. If they don’t walk, or they are handed objects instead of reaching for them, their brain doesn’t reconfigure itself to this new way of seeing.⁴ Furthermore, when people take off the glasses in these stationary studies, they readapt immediately, without any dizziness or other adverse symptoms.

Our brain is astonishing. Our perceptual abilities are magnificent, especially our visual perception. But our bodies matter, too, often more than we realize. Action changes the brain and how we interpret information in the world. Yet the modern story of the brain is largely about what happens in our head. We are told the brain is a kind of biological supercomputer. That three-pound lump of squishy goo, nestled in our skull, is the engine that drives our ability to think, reason, decide, plan, and make sense of the world around us. That’s the standard story and so, as a result, we tend to view the world as out there (beyond the head) and understanding is in here (inside the head). Although the brain remains supremely important, there is more to the story, as the Stratton effect suggests.

The Stratton effect brings to mind an aphorism, often attributed to Confucius, sometimes as just an old Chinese proverb, that goes “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.” It’s a reminder of the connection between doing and understanding, and how acting in the world shapes our ability to make sense of it. In the pages that follow, we will see how the science of mind is evolving in a direction that echoes Confucius, though, of course, as always with science, it’s somewhat more complicated than something you can print on a t-shirt. Our purpose in this chapter is to wrap our arms around this new science of mind and, from that, develop a foundation for how the information in our world can help us become better thinkers. Let’s start there, with a question: How does the mind work?