Can you see it?

Once I heard on a radio show a journalist saying that

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand it, we wouldn’t be capable of understanding it!

Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the journalist, neither the radio show, nor the context. Not even how old I was. I do remember I was in the car with my father in the Grajaú-Jacarepaguá road, in Rio, arriving in Grajaú.

We are full of limitations. Our vision, for example, is sensitive to only a band of the radiation spectrum. Our hearing also has limits. A child only develops visual maturity (that is, can associate shapes, colors, contrasts with information about their meanings) around the age of 9-10 years. So the next time you hear “don’t believe what your eyes are seeing”, well… maybe you really shouldn’t believe it!

Want to see?! Then look at the figure below and write down the number and suit of the cards in the deck in the order they appear.

Did you write it down?! So check it out: if you scored 4 of spades, 5 of hearts, 7 of spades, 6 of hearts, 3 of spades, 2 of hearts, 5 of spades, Ace of hearts… something is wrong with you. Let’s see, if you scored 4 of hearts, 5 of hearts, 7 of spades, 6 of spades, 3 of hearts, 2 of spades, 5 of spades and Ace of hearts… there’s something wrong with you too.

In fact, there is purposely a modification in the cards. The 3 and 4 of hearts are painted black, the 2 and 6 of spades are painted red. Most people make some kind of mistake in this experiment. If you classified cards in the first group, it is because your perception is more influenced by colors, while in the second group, by shapes. There may be intermediate levels of perception between colors and shapes.

Color	Form
4 of spades	4 of hearts (black)
5 of hearts	5 of hearts
7 of spades	7 of spades
6 of hearts	6 of spades (red)
3 of spades	3 of hearts (black)
2 of hearts	2 of spades (red)
5 of spades	5 of spades
ace of hearts	ace of hearts

This game is part of a complex experiment, published by Bruner & Postman in 1949, to explore our ability to recognize incongruity.

The authors observed that our brain cannot look at a new event without trying to relate it to a past event. That’s why we have such a hard time spotting the modified cards: we have an expectation about how an ace of hearts should look like and we cannot ignore this expectations.

Perception is not an isolated act! Hence our difficulty in recognizing incongruity.

Because the brain knows the cards in the deck, it knows that a black 4 cannot be hearts, and automatically corrects that information for you. So even though you see a black 4 of hearts, you perceive a 4 of spades (or vice versa, if the correction is made by form). It can take a long time for the brain to realize that there is something wrong and new information to assess.

This feature of our brain has profound implications to our decision-making. Actions as simple as getting up from a chair, taking a step, reaching out to something triggers decision-making processes. If the brain did not adapt establishing prior knowledge of the environment, the amount of information processing would be so great that deciding whether or not to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water would take forever!

The cost of acquiring, processing and storing new information is very high.

Then all organisms develop some kind of expectation about the environment in which they find themselves. For this, it seeks to maximize the perceptions related to their needs, minimizing those unrelated. These expectations create a certain security, and even a certain comfort, for our daily actions. Most people need a certain constancy in their environment. A kind of ‘screen saver’, a ‘processing economy’ mechanism for the brain.

This mechanism must be very important, because when these expectations are frustrated, the brain puts up a stiff resistance to acknowledging the ‘new’. That’s why we see ‘modified’ cards as one of the cards we already know.

Despite this resistance to the ‘new’, the brain is no fool. If the evidence of the new is strong, repeated and indisputable, the processing mechanism of this new information is activated and it is incorporated. During the experiment, as the time of exposure to the modified cards increased, giving more time for the brain to perceive the ‘new’ information , more and more people identified the incongruity.

However, some people needed to look at the card for longer than 5 sec to be able to recognize the modification, the incongruity. And some, even after staring at the letter for several seconds, did not recognize the modification, despite being aware that something was wrong. The inability to decide due to the conflict between ‘established information’ and ‘new information’ led some people to despair!

The conclusion of this experiment is that only an organism that is very sick, highly motivated (for denial), or without the opportunity to exercise verification mechanisms (which in this case was to look at the cards long enough); resists new information, supported by strong evidence, to cling to a pre-established expectation by the brain,which has just been frustrated.

It is either a very sick organism, an overly motivated one, or one deprived of the opportunity to “try-and-check” which will not give up an expectancy in the face of a contradicting environment. It would be our contention, nonetheless, that for as long as possible and by whatever means available, the organism will ward off the perception of the unexpected, those things which do not fit his prevailing set.

Bruner JS & Postman L. 1949 . On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm. Journal of Personality 18: 206-23

However, and this is important, for as long as possible and using all available means, an organism will be reluctant to perceive the unexpected, those things that do not fit into its known set of events.

Discoveries are rare because our expectations cloud our vision and cloud our perception of the world.

Thomas Kuhn in ‘The structure of scientific revolutions’

Our reluctance to the ‘new’ helps us having more comfortable lives, but the world around us changes. The better our mechanisms for ‘verifying’ new information, the better our perception will be and the faster (and better) we can adapt to it. But if the reluctance to the new is maintained at the expense of the information collected by our 5 senses, a conflict that can lead to madness!

Change is necessary, even if it hurts.

Originally published in Portuguese in July 22, 2006 at https://www.blogs.unicamp.br/vqeb2/2006/07/22/por-que-mudar-e-tao-dificil/