Through the Doors of Perception

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of The Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it!

Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

This week, we are going to be looking at how we perceive the world.

Is it possible to experience all the world's reality, or are we living an illusion?

Just as the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote that we are unable to to know what it is like to be a bat, can we really know what it's like to be another human being beyond ourselves?

What of how we experience time?

Einstein said, Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour.

Yet, an hour with a beautiful woman seems like a minute, which is why he spent much of his research budget on trying to build a girlfriend out of kettles.

Also, to be honest, who managed to spend a minute with their hand on a hot stove?

That is, I think that Einstein might have been overrated.

I think it's making me feel owl, but I'm not sure yet.

So, anyway, Brian, I have to ask you to begin with, as the most rational on the show, always, is it really possible to know reality?

Is the idea of a single reality ludicrous?

Are we all experiencing just one of many realities?

Yes, no, no.

Good, that'll do.

If you missed that, you can download the Infinite Monkey Cage as a podcast from the BBC website.

Rewind and listen to Robin's question again in order to gain insight into his little comedian's brain.

Thank you.

Yes, no, no.

On today's panel, to hopefully enlighten us, but possibly bamboozlers, too, too, we're joined by the presenter of Radio 4's All in the Mind and author of the award-winning Time Warped, a book examining our perception of time, psychologist Claudia Hammond.

Our next guest is a neuroscientist, artist, and head of the eponymous laboratory Delotto Lab.

He's also behind the only peer-reviewed paper that begins once upon a time.

Apart from all papers in the Journal of Philosophy.

Bolotto.

And our final guest returns after previously discussing the science of symmetry and discovering discovering that what he had presumed were flippantly extravagant ideas for his early comic strips were actually scientifically accurate.

He may yet be the first sock puppet worshipping wizard to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

It is Alan Moore and this is our panel.

Now we're going to start off with because what we are going to be talking about to some extent are the limits of the mind and the ideas of perception.

So we're actually going to start with a brief quote from Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception.

And he wrote, To make biological survival possible, mind at large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.

What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

So, Claudia, first of all, that idea that consciousness is a measly trickle of what actually is all around us.

I think that's right.

I mean, there's everything that's around us in the world, and we're taking in a tiny amount of it and processing a tiny amount of it.

You know, there's too much for us to take absolutely everything in.

And so our minds constantly have to narrow in and focus in on what's important.

So Bo, how do you feel about that?

Are we only able to take on board a certain amount of reality, otherwise does that just stymie us and stall us?

In some sense we take on board no reality.

When it comes to seeing, for instance, your eyes have very little to do with seeing.

Okay, that seems a bit odd, but actually your eyes contribute about ten percent of the information your brain uses to see.

The other ninety percent comes comes in the other parts of your brain.

So your eyes are like a keyboard is to the computer.

It's how you get the stuff in, but has very little to do with what you actually see.

So the argument is that we actually see no reality at all.

We only see meaning.

Although in physics, of course, it's different.

We measure

properties of the universe.

It's so physical.

It's the mass of the electron, the wavelength of the radiation emitted from hydrogen atoms.

We must accept there's a reality out there that we can measure.

There is a physical reality out there, so we're not sort of brains in a jar on shelves making it all up.

But in another sense, we are literally making it up.

So that information comes in.

We have these measurements, and we can use physics to measure the world.

The deeper question is, what?

No, there can't be a deeper question.

The harder question,

because physics is actually quite easy.

So the harder question.

Wow, this has turned WWF pretty early, hasn't it?

Because once you actually start dealing with living systems, then it becomes far more complicated because then those living systems actually have to do something.

They have to make sense of the information.

And so that's what your brain evolved to do.

It literally evolved to make what is completely meaningless and make it meaningful because you actually have to behave.

So physics doesn't have to behave.

Physicists do, but.

So good, so Bose covered that one.

Apparently.

Physics is meaningless.

Good, Brian.

We'll move on.

And the.

Not precisely what he said, is it?

Well, it's not exactly what he said, but in the edit he will.

Alan, that idea of a measly trickle of consciousness, how do you feel?

This is an area that you've kind of looked at and the ideas of perception.

Well, I think that although I can understand that, yeah, there is a reality out there and studying the particles and forces that make it up is a good way of summoning up that reality.

But I would also say that the majority of our reality from one standpoint is neurological.

We don't perceive reality directly.

We only perceive our perception of reality.

We know that there are lots of things, say x-rays, that we cannot see.

It's absurd to think that those five senses are the only five senses that could conceivably exist anywhere in the universe.

So you'd have to say that potentially there might be an awful lot of the universe that we're missing.

However,

probably we wouldn't function very well if we could see X-rays and neutrinos and things like that.

I mean, it would make your job a lot easier, Brian, but the rest of us would suffer.

I mean, there is a lot of the universe that we're missing, sort of 95.5%, 96%.

Well, that's just the amount of dark matter and other stuff that we know must be there, but we can't find it.

Well, this is the point.

So, we measured it without using our senses.

We measured it by

obviously at some point

there must be an interface to our brains.

Actually, is it that is that?

I mean, we I was gonna

do that.

I've just realised that this may be what we're gonna talk about.

So, is that what we're talking about?

Are we talking about basically the interface between our perception of the universe and the universe itself?

Uh Claudia's nodding, so we'll go straight to the internet.

Straight to Claudia, because she's nodding along with me.

Yeah, in a sense, we I'm sort of nodding.

In a sense,

we constantly construct in our own minds what it is we're seeing, and so there is that interface.

But I mean, I think what's interesting is that even when there's, say, you know, discoveries from physics, it doesn't change how we perceive the world.

So the world still looks flat when you're standing on it, and we know it's not now, but yet we haven't changed our perception of that, even though we know that.

Both just when Alan there was mentioning the idea that we are perceiving our perception.

So how do you define

the science of perception?

What is it that you are particularly looking into?

Well, what we love to be able to do is get inside people's heads and actually experience what they're experiencing, but we can't do that.

And so measuring the activity of your brain is one way of doing that.

But really, all we can do is measure behavior.

So the worst thing you can do is actually ask someone what they see.

Because often what we describe and how we explain how we behave and why we behave is different from what we actually do.

So the best thing you can do is actually just measure behaviour and consistency of behavior in particular.

And then you try to make predictions that if I change it this way, behavior will go that way.

So, we've defined roughly what we mean by perception.

I thought it'd be useful to define what you mean by a psychologist, because I just think, I always just think of Freud.

I always think of Freud, because that's the psychology I learned at school.

Yeah, you see, in most psychology undergraduate degrees, people wouldn't learn anything about Freud these days.

You know, it's so far removed from Freud.

So, now, what modern psychology is, is the study of mind and behaviour.

So, you can do tests on people's memory, tests on attention, you can measure all sorts of things that you wouldn't think you would be able to, but yet they have found ways of doing that.

And it relies on you, you know, doing it well.

It relies on there are problems with will people just do what they think the experimenter wants them to do, and you need to design experiments well to try to avoid that.

But you can

come up with findings and conclusions.

So, is the ultimate goal then?

We're trying to measure we're measuring behavior, behavior is the thing we measure.

So that's the only thing we can measure essentially, is individual behavior in different circumstances.

But

are we trying to develop a theory of mind, a theory of consciousness, a theory of what it is to be human?

Is that the goal of the research?

You could argue that the brain evolved to do one thing.

It evolved to take what's uncertain and make it certain.

That's its fundamental challenge, is uncertainty.

That all information is uncertain.

So how does the brain make meaning from that?

So effectively, that's what we're trying to do, is we're trying to understand how the brain makes meaning from things that are meaningless, right?

Both at sort of the high level, psychological level, or more at the mechanistic level.

How does that actually instantiate itself in sort of the architecture of the brain?

How does meaning exist in that architecture?

Meaning, Alan, meaning is an interesting word, isn't it?

I want to ask them to define it in a moment.

But what do you consider by when we speak of meaning?

I was just thinking when Beau was talking about the physicist Murray Gell-Mann,

who suggested that human beings are, in fact, something that he called oigis is.

It stands for information gathering and utilising systems.

We are in a sea of information

and that it is our natural inclination to

use that in some way to reduce uncertainty, as as Beau was saying.

I wouldn't say that I subscribed to the teleological view that the universe had got some intrinsic meaning or direction.

That doesn't sound very likely.

However,

since, as far as we know, we are the highest form of intelligence that we have yet discovered in the universe, I think that that gives us certain rights.

I think that we can bestow meaning.

We look at the chaos of the stars and we say that one looks a bit like a bull,

that one looks like a bit like a lady on the toilet, or Cassiopeia.

Which constellation is that?

Cassiopeia.

Cassiopeia, the lady on the toilet.

I thought everybody knew that, but

this is Northampton rules astronomy, by the way.

But the thing is, yeah, of course, those are just random stars.

They don't really look like a lady on the the toilet or a bull or anything.

However, once we've imposed random meaning upon them, we can then navigate.

Well, that's interesting, Beau, because you've done some work as well in terms of seeing how suggestion and instruction can change, well, give different meanings or different ways that we perceive things differently.

Yeah, if we think about the question that Brian said he was going to ask, which is about what is meaning, is behavioural value.

That's what meaning means, what this thing meant for my behavior in the past, which means your perception is forever grounded in that past.

So, what we do is we take that experience and then we project it into the future.

So, I now get some more information and I try to make sense of it.

So, I now see the constellation that I didn't see before.

So, if you want, we can do this piece of music.

Yeah.

Right.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to listen to a piece of music.

You all know the song.

And you'll hear meaning, right?

You're going to hear lyrics.

You can hear someone singing.

So, should we just hear that?

Yeah.

Okay.

Did everyone hear something?

Did you hear meaning?

Now we're gonna hear the exact same piece of music play backward.

Okay?

Now, did anyone hear any meaning in that?

For those who've never heard it before, put up your hands if you heard anything meaningful.

Okay, so no one, right?

Okay, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to suggest something to you, right?

And

this is not a personal suggestion, by the way, all right?

Which is it's fun to smoke marijuana.

I'm just going to suggest that to you.

All right?

Now, what I want you to do is listen to this again and see if you hear anything.

Okay?

So now,

did you hear anything?

If you did, it says a lot about you.

Now, we should say, of course, that literally doesn't exist in the sound.

What you're hearing doesn't exist.

Those words aren't there, as you know, when you first listen to it.

And what is amazing is that you can never unhear that.

So I probably heard that for the first time when I was a student 20 or so years ago.

And now I haven't heard that since then, and I cannot not hear that sound.

You can't undo it, can you?

And it should make clear, by the way, that it is not fun to smoke marijuana.

But

linking to that, and going back to something Alan said earlier, a natural inclination to find patterns, which is what that is, I suppose.

Is it the case that we've evolved to be pattern recognisers?

So as Alan said, in this array of data, we're swamped by data.

But there's a real advantage.

We must find patterns in it in order to survive.

Yes, and no, that's the first part.

So the brain evolved to find patterns, right?

Because patterns are a more efficient description of the information you're getting in.

So what you're really doing when you're finding patterns is you're finding relationships.

But there's an infinite number of possible relationships that are meaningful.

So your brain finds those patterns and then it tests it and it asks,

is this a useful pattern?

So it behaves and it finds out whether or not that behavior is successful or not.

What you then perceive is not the pattern.

You perceive the meaning of the pattern, what was significant about that pattern, what it enables you to do.

So even seeing red is actually seeing the meaning of the pattern of light that falls onto your eye.

But

don't we tend to see patterns where none exist?

And an example would be seeing a snake in the grass where no snake exists.

And it's clearly gives you an advantage if you err on the side of caution, if you're walking through the grass and you see something that looks like a snake.

So is that the explanation for this over

interpretation of the data that our senses give us?

Yes, so we've evolved to detect those patterns that were meaningful before.

And actually, again, depending on your state of power, you will actually be better at detecting patterns than other times.

So in a lower state of power, you're more likely to detect pattern even when pattern doesn't exist, probably because it was evolutionally useful to do so.

So if you're in in a low state of power, it means that it would be better to actually see the interpret the thing as a possible snake, because they're more likely a prey as opposed to a pattern.

So, low state of power, you mean frightened, for example?

Frightened, low state of control, frightened, lower social and economic status, those are all related to lower states of power.

We look for certain sorts of patterns more than others.

So, faces are one that we'll notice all the time, which is why you can see that a house, a front of a house, can look like a face, and how can it possibly look like a face?

But we'll see faces everywhere, and we're really tuned to seeing two eyes and a mouth, mouth, and we'll see that that's a face.

And yet, that makes sense.

That back in our past, you know, we needed to look for other people, they might be dangerous to you, and you need to look for other animals as well.

So, it makes sense that there are certain sorts of patterns that we then look for more than others.

Well, are there we're talking about using the snake as an example?

How much do we now understand about the physical parts of the brain?

What is working at what point, in terms of, for instance, the situation like the snake, for instance, if you see that in the grass, or you think you see a snake, your first reaction is, ah, snake, and then you rationalise and you go, oh, hang on a minute, it's just a pattern that looks like a a snake.

So, do we now know, kind of, you know, can we start to pinpoint the geography of the brain in a scenario such as that?

Yeah, I mean, the neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux in New York has done a lot of work on this, and he's done it in rats.

And what he's worked out is that there's a quick and dirty route into the brain when we're really afraid.

So, you see what you think is a snake in the grass, and there's this quick and dirty route, and automatically the amygdala, this little walnut-sized area deep inside the brain, is alerted to say there's a problem here.

The alarm goes off, if you like.

And then you look again and you realize actually it isn't, it's just some twigs and a leaf.

And that's when you're looking for a second time in a much slower way, and the brain is going around the long route and you're making proper cognitive appraisals to say, well, what is that really?

What do I know about what snakes look like?

What do I know about what sticks look like?

I'm matching this up.

What I'm actually seeing there is a stick, and I don't need to be afraid anymore.

And that whole fight or flight mechanism can then calm down.

You can stop breathing fast and you can calm down again.

But in a sense, it needs to be set like a smoke alarm is.

The smoke alarm sometimes goes off when you burnt the toast, and that's really annoying.

But you need it to do that so that the time the house is really on fire, it does it.

And that's the same with our fear system.

So our fear system needs to be slightly over-primed, and unfortunately, it will give us these false alarms when we get scared for a moment.

But that's worth it for the times when we really do need to be.

And just to pin down this word meaning, because it's a loaded word, isn't it?

I mean,

full of possibilities for misinterpretation.

So by meaning, do you mean, would that be what you mean by meaning, that you see see a pattern and the meaning of that pattern is a snake?

So, are you talking about the representation of that pattern in your mind?

My definition of meaning, whether or not it's the correct one, I don't know, but my definition of meaning relates to behaviour.

So, I get this pattern that falls onto my eye, and I generate a perception that represents what this thing would have enabled or been significant for my behavior in the past.

So, that's behavioral significance is what I call meaning.

The behavior is running away, right?

That's the behavior that happens.

So the meaning of the pattern is.

It might mean run away, it might not.

Well, if it's a snake.

So they go.

Hello.

Well,

so how we then think about the behavioural significance, which of course varies from context to context.

So the same information might have, that same information might have a different behavioural significance depending on what's surrounding it in space and time.

And what's amazing is that can happen in an instance.

So as you say, in the zoo, we're not afraid of the snake, unless you're phobic about snakes, then you're afraid of them all, obviously.

But if you're in a zoo, you're not afraid of the snake because it's in a tank.

But if that same snake was in your sleeping bag in the jungle, then you'd be a bit afraid and it would be different.

And we take that context into account even in a split second.

Alan, you a lot of the characters that you've created that you've written, their perception of the world in some ways may well have elements of kind of abnormal psychology, elements of delusion.

And I was thinking in particular of something like Swamp Thing, which you kind of reinvented, where originally Swamp Thing, before you handled it, was a mutant man, really.

And then you turned it into, I believe, your own phrase, a vegetable with delusions of grandeur.

And which is probably one of my favorite phrases of all time.

And so it's going to be the audience question: is who is that?

But a vegetable with delusion.

God, that covers so many people, doesn't it?

I've seen the full current cabinet.

Sorry, the

but those kind of vegetable with delusions of grandeur or characters like Rorschach and the way that they perceive the world.

And I wondered how much you have been influenced by kind of you know psychological writing in the 20th century and how you try and interpret those characters.

Well, first, can I say I'm really, really glad that you stopped going on about snakes?

I mean, I'm sitting right here,

you know,

but

yeah, I think that you should explain that a little bit further.

Well, just the fact that I do worship a second-century sock puppet

in the form of a snake, you know, so let's have a bit of respect, you know.

But,

yeah, on the on the question of abnormal psychologies, or I mean, this to me is one of the most interesting things about writing.

That you can actually put your consciousness into a completely different

person,

a person of another gender,

of another race, of another age,

and even some completely fantastic entity.

If you're going to write them successfully, you have to inhabit them.

You can come close to throwing some light upon an unimaginable state by speculating upon what different psychologies might be like.

And bearing in mind that a lot of the breakthroughs in neuroscience have actually been foreshadowed by artists, stream of consciousness, writing, things like that.

These were in literature before they were properly conceptualised in psychology.

Yet neuroscience is making huge advances, and it's probably the most exciting field at the moment in terms of those advances.

I completely agree with that idea.

Well, you know, I'm saying that this week, Brian, I might have changed my mind next week, you know.

But

the actual nature of consciousness

is

still,

it's probably still, it's less the ghost in the machine than it was,

but to some degree it is still completely ineffable.

We don't really understand what it is, where it is situated.

We can't even say for certain that consciousness is situated within the body.

I was reading a thing the other day talking about how, for a blind person,

their consciousness, or at least part of it, is at the end of their stick.

That sort of thing they have made their stick into a sense organ,

and so their consciousness, the sound of the stick, the feel of the stick, that is part of their consciousness.

Alan British is an interesting point about the blind person with a stick, because there's this picture in science fiction you often get of a brain in a jar, and you think that a human can be a brain in a jar and they can think.

Is that now an old-fashioned view of what consciousness is?

Do you just take the senses and the brain as a whole?

I say it is, and in a sense, there's an increasing consensus that we're getting all the time signals from the rest of our bodies that are leading to our sense of consciousness that are contributing to that.

And so, there's this concept called intraceptive awareness, which is that 10% of people, particularly 10% of men, can feel their heart beating all the time without holding their hand to the heart.

They can just feel it beating all the time and are aware of it, particularly lean young men.

They can do it more.

In experiments, everyone's out there, and I can feel it.

In experiments.

Can you rub in?

In experiments with lean young men, where they get them into a lab, they can wire them up so they make you think that you're listening to your own heartbeat

and then they make it go faster.

And when they make it go faster, people start feeling more anxious, even though they're just listening to the sound of their heartbeat over a speaker and their heart isn't really going faster, but they'll feel it does.

And if you look at people with locked-in syndrome, their spinal cord's been severed at the neck, and so they can't obviously feel anything else that's going on below the neck.

And it's often been commented on that people with locked-in syndrome stay much calmer than other patients who can't move around.

And it might be that some of their emotions have actually been damped down by not being able to get any feedback at all anymore from their spinal cord.

And so, I think people are starting to look more widely, as you say, than just the brain in the jar.

Whether consciousness exists in the brain or whether it exists outside yourself, what we see is necessarily a consequence of our interaction with the world, shaped by our experience with the world.

So, in that sense, we can never be sort of outside observers of nature.

We're defined by that interaction with nature.

So, in that sense, you can think about a spider and its web.

Where does the spider end and where does the web begin?

And there's probably some real sense in which the spider is very much part of the web.

It's called the extended phenotype.

So, in that sense, our consciousness probably does very much exist into the world.

The most essential part of that world is other people.

So, it's interactions between people is probably where consciousness to some extent resides.

I know, Claudia, that you've written recently about the perception of time.

Now, time clearly exists outside our body.

I'll put that down as a marker.

The perception of time is something that I suppose we all take for granted.

But I know you've written about the experiments on how people perceive time in different situations with different stimuli when stressed, when not stressed.

So could you speak a little bit about that?

Yeah, so because, like all perception, we actively construct our own experience of time and what's happening.

So, as you say, there is time out there, but not all minutes feel the same to us.

So, if you're waiting for 20 minutes and your train's late and it's raining, and they keep saying it'll be one minute, and one minute, and one minute, and you're going to be late for your meetings, that 20 minutes will feel like a very long 20 minutes.

If you're grabbing a quick sandwich for lunch with a friend and you've only got 20 minutes and you've got to get back to work in no time at all, you'll look at your watch and it's time to go again.

Those 20 minutes subjectively definitely don't feel the same.

People will often talk about experiences where time slowed right down because they were really afraid, and people will talk about that in car accidents and how time stretched out.

And that seems to happen for various reasons.

And one is that we focus in on the important things.

If you're in a car accident, you stop noticing the music changing on the radio, and you don't notice the other cars passing by you.

You have to focus in on what's important.

And also, we know that strong emotions etch memories more strongly into our minds.

So you would think about lots of things very, very fast during that time when you're really scared.

That will create lots of memories.

And one of the chief ways that we work out how much time we feel has passed is by how many new memories we've made.

So when you look straight afterwards at that accident, it will feel as if it was very long because you've created all these new memories and you've stopped focusing on all those other things, which will be the real marker of time passing.

Is there any sense in which it's

a real effect?

I was talking to

a friend of mine, actually, who's a mountain climber, who said that he fell off a mountain.

He fell from about 40 feet up.

And he said to me, I said, well, why aren't you dead?

Basically.

And he said, he described

this state of mind he was in where he felt he had plenty of time and he could turn around and look for where to land.

And he said,

if you fall in and you move your head, you'll twist around.

So he described it as though he had been an experienced mountaineer.

He had all the time in the world to

pick a spot to land, basically.

I think he ended up breaking both his ankles, but he didn't land on his head.

And now, is that real?

Is there a real sense in which, in a stressful situation, your brain can process things in a way that will help you survive?

It's definitely the case that you pay more attention, and so then you are going to ignore everything that you don't need, and you're going to really focus on all those things you can do.

You're going to really focus on all the memories of everything that might help you.

So, that guy will be thinking of all the things he's learnt and what is it that he needs to do to save himself.

They've tried experiments.

David Eagleman, the neuroscientist in the States, has tried experiments where he's thrown people backwards off very high towers.

He did catch them.

He did catch them.

I don't think they get ethical permission for that one.

But yes, he did catch them.

He tried actually sending them off forwards first of all, but it wasn't scary enough.

So in the end, he dropped them off backwards.

And so they start to fall very, very fast.

They feel very scared.

He did it himself three times, which I think is nice when the psychologists join in themselves in the experiments.

And he said it was still beyond scary the third time.

He thought he'd be used to it, but he never got used to it.

And what they did was, as they were falling, they had to look at a big counter.

It was like a clock flashing of a counter going over.

That normally the numbers would be moving too fast for you to see.

And they wanted to know if the brain was actually processing information faster, then would they be able to see what was going on?

Now, in fact, they couldn't.

Most of the time, occasionally they could see it, but most of the time they couldn't see what was going on.

So we can't say that the brain is actually going faster, but it is definitely paying attention.

and you definitely can think better at those times than at any other time.

And I've had people say, Oh, how could we recreate that so that we could be brilliant?

But I'm not sure you'd really want to create life-threatening, terrifying moments too often, really.

By the way, I should say, when Brian said a friend of mine is a mountain climber, he meant the man who carries him up all the high stuff for the wonders shows.

That's a helicopter pilot.

Just one final thing in terms of the the passing of time.

John Mortimer talked about when he got into his 80s.

He said, Once you're in your 80s, he said, it seems like you have breakfast every five minutes.

You know, the speed of the day.

And something you write about in Time Warped is, why is it, and it's a very common question, why is it the older you get, the faster you seem to feel that time is going?

I mean, people will often say that Christmas seems to be coming around faster and faster, and then it's Easter, then it's the holidays, then it's Christmas again, faster and faster.

And the theory that people often give for this, people will often say, oh, I know why it's all about proportions.

It's because when you're eight, a year is only an eighth of your life.

when you're forty, it's a fortieth of your life.

And if you think that, you're in good company.

Vladimir Nabokov thought that, the philosopher Paul Janet thought that.

But in a sense, that's only a description of what it feels like rather than what's actually happening.

Because people don't report that single days go any faster.

What people report is that the months and the years seem to go by faster, but the single days still seem to feel as if they're passing normally.

And also, if the proportionality theory did hold, then if you lived till you were 80, you'd have lived half your subjective life by the time you're 20, which would be a shame, I think.

And also, a single day at the age of 40 should feel as though it flashes by, because that's only one fourteen thousandth of your life so far.

So, it should go by like that, but it doesn't.

So, in a sense, the proportionality theory only describes it rather than explains it.

But one of the reasons is that we look at time in two different ways.

We constantly look at it prospectively.

So, we say, How fast is this time going right now?

Is it fun?

Am I bored?

Is it going fast?

Is it going slowly?

And then we look at it retrospectively.

We look back and say, How long did that monkey cage feel as if it took?

How long did that feel?

And we look at it in these two different ways.

And when you apply that to the passage of life,

then we look at a normal day and we think, yes,

this is passing normally.

But when we start to look back on time, we have fewer, we make fewer new memories as we get older because we have fewer new experiences because there are more routines, there's more repeats of things.

And so we've made fewer new memories, and we very much judge how much time has passed by how many new memories we've made.

and we haven't made any of these those new memories and so we think that not much time has passed and then we're suddenly taken up short by seeing something you know I see things I own in vintage shops which is clearly impossible

and leads me to believe a few more years have passed than I might like to think and so this this suddenly brings us up short because we see these markers in time and that that gives us this this sense that it's it's going slightly wrong that things have gone astray somehow.

Alan, moving on to another subject, which is, you know, for creatures with this this brain, this consciousness, this ability to try and comprehend the world, we also seem to have a tremendous habit of altering the way that we perceive the world.

You know, whether it's through drinking, whether it's through drugs, whether it's through ingesting many different things.

Why do you think it is that that humanity wants to, or certain members of humanity, want to change the way they perceive the world?

Why is it that we do that?

Well, I would say that

for some

people

it is probably occupational.

But if you're in any of the creative fields,

then

it's vitally important that you come up with your own way of seeing things.

All that is, in a way, a kind of propaganda for a state of mind, which is something that I've played around with, sort of, under the guise of

explorations of magic, which is basically manipulation of consciousness.

That this is not the only consciousness that is possible or conceivable, that there may be different forms of consciousness which would throw different lights upon the world.

It's a bit like apparently, even dogs,

if they are faced with something that they don't understand, they will cock their heads upon one side.

Something that humans do, all sorts of mammals do it.

It's just that,

and it might be because that will change your perception a little bit.

It will give you a little bit more information.

And that's why we do it.

We try to change our consciousness because it will give us information that was previously veiled from us or kept from us.

Bo, if I was to ask you, it's possibly, I suppose, a very difficult question, but if you could summarise the state of our understanding of consciousness at the moment, I mean, how much do we understand?

How much

is it it possible that in the at some point you can foresee

a theory, a genuine scientific theory of mind?

Just cock your head and move on, it'll be fine.

Yes.

But I don't we we can't define consciousness in the same way we can't define life but we still do biology.

So we can't define consciousness but we can still study human behavior.

Whether we can actually come to understand it, it's possible, but we might understand it in a completely different way than what we think about now.

I mean, would you describe it as an emergent property, a classic emergent property?

Well, it's an emergent property of the activity of your brain.

So yes, it's emerging from something.

Whether it evolved to actually do something, I think it evolved to do something.

I think it evolved to do what I want to talk about, the ability to actually project yourself, to have empathy, to imagine yourself in different scenarios without actually having to enact those scenarios.

That it's a way of having experience without the risk of having the physical experience.

And that then comes to shape how you will see yourself in the future.

Also, there is the problem of whether the consciousness which we enjoy at the moment is the same

as that consciousness which we enjoyed in the antiquity.

of our species.

I mean, there's a brilliant book by Julian James called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

You don't even have to read the book.

If you can just memorize the title, you can intimidate almost anybody.

But what he is saying is that

consciousness as we know it may be a relatively recent thing.

That this is a thing that you can probably only chart

by looking at literature, at art, and making deductions.

I mean, I was thinking, I was talking to Robin the other day, and I was telling him about something that I'd read about Homer,

the wine dark seas.

Isn't that a ridiculous, lousy metaphor?

I mean, dark wine is red, isn't it?

And seas famously aren't.

So,

was Homer a bad poet?

I don't believe so.

Is it possible that perception has changed?

Because I believe that there are other philosophers and writers in antiquity who make similar strange choices of words that kind of suggest that

not that seas once were wine dark, but that we once perceived them as being wine dark, perhaps after too much dark wine.

It's always possible.

You know, Brian hankers for a world where everything could just be viewed objectively.

And I wondered how.

No, I live in a world where everything can be viewed objectively.

You perceive not in a world anyway.

Could a creature, such a creature, that viewed the world entirely objectively, could it survive?

And does it truly have an evolutionary advantage?

I'll start with you, Claudia.

I don't think it would have an evolutionary advantage.

We don't want to see every single thing that there is and have to take all that in.

We need to focus on the things that we need to.

And we have an advantage by not seeing everything there is, not hearing everything there is, not having all these confusing signals coming in all the time.

Bo?

I suppose I don't know what the question means.

I don't know what it would mean to see it objectively.

Let's imagine you could see the world exactly as it is.

It still doesn't tell you what to do.

You still have to behave towards it.

Alan?

G.

O.

Gurdieff, the philosopher.

He decided that he was going to be objective and conscious about his every action.

I think several years later he was still trying to drive a car.

I'd say that consciousness and objectivity are wildly overrated.

By the way, I just remembered there are studies that show that people who are more objective, relatively objective, are actually increasingly unhappy.

The more delusional, the more happy you are.

The happier you are.

That's true.

So we've

asked the audience here a question, as usual, and today we asked them: if you went through the doors of perception, what sort of reality would you like to see on the other side?

And from Dave Bull, infinite possibilities, an array of bowls of porridge, like realistic, if literal Goldilocks effect, me in infinite bodies, dining infinitely, possible outcomes.

That sounds good.

This is one that begins well.

It says there is no reality, only one's perception.

See, I disagree with that profoundly.

Anyway,

there would be a world full of infinite possibilities, very beautiful, and pizza.

If you went through the doors of perception, it's somewhere where you can see the consequences had you made the opposite decision in things.

Also, another door to get back, just in case.

Perception enables us to sense what we believe is reality.

Truth be told, our perception of reality may not actually be reality.

Therein lies the problem of the question.

We may never know the true reality of objects or their qualities, so how can we be sure what the reality that we desire isn't actually the reality that exists and we're just not perceiving it accurately?

Another problem.

What changes when we cross the threshold of the door?

Is the hard wiring in our brain that changes the way we perceive the same objects, or is it the same methods of perception change?

We suddenly grow a seventh sense, question mark.

Or simply, an alternate reality exists in another universe and our perceptions remain the same.

Nalia Dahli, you've just got your PhD.

Right,

very, very similar one from Max.

It says, one where every seat has enough legroom.

This is definitely from

a physicist.

It just says, food, beer, sex, and a clean loo.

A world where there are enough Brian Coxes for every grandmother in the land.

You've been treating that.

Thank you very much to everyone who joined us.

Thank you to Claudia Hammond, Bo Lotto, and Alan Moore.

Next week we'll be discussing fossils, dinosaurs and cryptids with Dave Martell, Mioni Coburn, and Ross Noble.

Yeah, Ross Noble and dinosaurs.

That won't be a long record.

So thank you very much and goodbye.

That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio?

Hmm.

Anyway, there's a competition in itself.

What do you think?

It's to be more than 15 minutes.

Shut up.

It's your fault.

You downloaded it.

Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to.

Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer.

Life Scientific.

His dad discovered the atomic nucleus.

That's Inside Science.

All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Richard Hammond's sister.

Richard Hammond's sister.

Thank you very much, Brian.

And also, Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects.

These are some of the science programs that you can listen to.

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