What exactly is perception? Until his death in 2015, for six decades Karl Pribram was a leading figure on defining perception and how it occurs within the brain, which is very different from the physical seeing that takes place with the eye. He wanted to understand how our eyes actually see objects, colours, the world around us, and then convert that seeing into a perceptible image in the brain, whether we are observing and processing with the left-brain or the right-brain? How does what is ‘out there’ travel to the eye, then pass electronically through the optic nerve, to reconfigure as a three-dimensional perception and then a memory in the brain?
What he discovered is that there is very little objective perception, objective memory or objective experienced reality. Everything is subjective, dependent upon our attitudes and intentions, the state we are in at the moment of perception. For the best outcome in our lives we need to learn that we are capable of changing this state if we so choose.
Pribram makes a careful distinction between objects and images. Objects are what are there in four-dimensional space-time reality, and they can be looked at from various perspectives to perceive a range of profiles or images of them within our brain. The implication is that different people - also the same people at different times in their lives - can observe the same object but perceive it differently, interpret it differently, and produce a different image of that object within their brain. Seeing is not the same as perceiving.
What Pribram went on to discover was that the image and memory of the external object that the receptive fields of the brain cortex produce changes according to which part of the brain and which side of the brain is being stimulated at the time.
When events stimulate the side of the brain (the inferior temporal cortex), you get images of the objects being perceived that are relevant to calculating and communicating. When events stimulate the front of the brain (the pre-frontal cortex), you get images of the objects being perceived that are relevant to visualisation and putting things in context.
But the object that is being perceived is the same in both cases - it is your perception that changes depending on the state of mind you are in when you view that object. And the state of mind you are in is partly dependent on your conscious intention and partly dependent on how the objects you are receiving information from trigger your neural attractor pathways – the result of your previous experience. If you see a big dog coming towards you, does it remind you of the vicious dog that bit you as a child or does it remind you of your pet that loved you and protected you? One will activate the sympathetic nervous system and the fight and flight hormones while the other will activate the parasympathetic nervous system and your affection and pleasure hormones.
This of course then fits in with taking time, a few deep breaths perhaps, the awareness of choice, allowing the brain to switch from the automatic reflex reactions of the limbic brain, to the more conscious frontal cortex, so that the perception and subsequent reaction can be as appropriate to the situation as possible.