Vemuri Ramesam, Thursday, August 20, 2015 5:33 am

The Enigma of Deep Sleep – 6

We relate ourselves to an external object in the world around us using our sensory or motor (or action) organs. While the dimension of time to our interactions with the objects is a construct of the mind alone, the mind and the sensory organs together contribute the 3-D spatial aspect to the awake state. We describe the consequent experience gained in the world as “empirical reality” because of the fact that it is based on our empirical knowledge obtained through our five senses and the mind.  Because we conduct our worldly transactions within the space-time reference frame of the wakeful state, we also call it as the “transactional reality.”

We take the reality of our normal day to day experience as granted and we tend to assess and adjudicate the other states from the position of and with reference to the wakeful state. However, we should bear in mind that the experience in the awake state is neither really real nor is it truly known to us to justify its use as a benchmark.

The mind and the sensory organs we have are not only inadequate as efficient apparatus to show us what exactly is out there, but also they misrepresent what exists there! Even the spatio-temporal dimensions which we hardly ever doubt in the wakeful world are totally imaginary and arbitrary. They are the illusory creations of the sense organs and the mind. There is a vast amount of scientific literature published demonstrating the disconnect between the information we glean with our mind (i.e. perception) and what is actually present out there (reality).

To bring you up to speed quickly and briefly without getting into the technical details, I shall list below a few illustrative examples to show how we are deceived in our perception by the mind and the sensory organs even when we are fully conscious and aware in the wakeful state. Such being the case, one would wonder how far we can go by what the mind tells us about a state like deep sleep when it is not present at all!

1.   Our Body:

We normally consider our own body as a fixed frame having well defined curves and contours. But our sense of body is not so firm. As the famous “Rubber Hand Illusion” demonstrates, our brain can deny the existence of our real hand and feel a detached rubber hand as a part of our body. People with amputated limbs often report excruciating pain from an excised body part and you know that it does not exist anymore. The brains of the persons with artificial limbs consider the attachments as part of the body itself.  The brains of the instrumental musicians like expert pianists treat the piano keys as extensions of their fingers.

 

Fig. 1:  Rubber Hand Illusion. Brain begins to claim ownership to the rubber hand after about 12 seconds of    brushing simultaneously the real hand and the rubber hand while you witness the brushing of only the rubber    hand. (It is so arranged in the experiment that the real hand is kept hidden behind a screen).

2.  Shapes and Sizes:

We believe the shapes and sizes we ascribe to the various objects that we perceive are true. But how easily we are misled by our vision can be realized from the figures below (Figures adopted from various sources – some maybe copyrighted):

 

Fig. 2:  Though the two tables are exactly of the same width and length, one appears to be rectangular and the  other squarish. If in doubt, you may verify the length and the breadth with a scale to convince yourself.

 

Fig 3:  The heap of the discs shown in the left half of the figure to the right here, if arranged in a different order, shows the presence of a cube (see the right half of the picture).  We get the illusory vision of a cube though none exists. It is called the Subjective Necker Cube.

Fig. 4:  We often attribute a meaning and identity to a perceived object from our conditioned mind (stored knowledge) rather than see what is actually present. That means we often prejudge what we are going to see. Please look at the left most figure in the first Panel (A). It appears to be a familiar picture of either two faces or a vase.  Which one appears to you first depends on your mental makeup. But the surprise is that they may be just meaningless lines. On the other hand, we may mistake the profile of a lady mopping the floor with a bucket of water beside her shown in a cartoon sketch as meaningless lines. Once this meaning is given, it will be difficult for you to imagine the picture in any other way.

Fig. 5:  The picture of Dr. Albert Einstein on the left seen from close range becomes that of the actress Marilyn Monroe when viewed from about 6-10 feet away, thus showing how distance can alter what we perceive an object to be.

3.  Colors do not exist in nature:

We see many colors in nature – the brown earth, the blue sky, the green leaves, multi-colored flowers, animals in many hues and so on. But these colors do not really exist out there!  Objects in nature do not possess rigidly fixed colors. What color an object shows depends on a number of factors like the type of light illuminating the object, the context, intensity of the light etc. The colors we see are a survival mechanism in evolution developed by our brains to help the body-organism in locating food and mate or to protect it from dangers. For example, in a forest scene like the one shown in the left panel in the Fig. 6, you would not be able to spot any wild beast that may jump on us. But add color to what is perceived, the lurking danger becomes obvious immediately.

  

Fig. 6:   Color is a survival strategy in nature.

The composite light rays from the objects impinging on the eye are split according to their wavelengths by the photoreceptors in our eyes and transmitted to the retina. It is the mind that adds a color code to these frequencies and gives a name to the color. A color blind person may not see any colors at all. And the same flowers may appear in different colors depending on the make of the color receptors in the eye.

                Fig. 7: Flowers from Saffron family plants. What we see as a purple flower appears yellow to a bee. We can see red and green tomatoes. But a dog cannot see the red and green colors.

4.  We see things much of the time based on our anticipation rather than what is actually present.

Read aloud the words in the two panels below.

Fig.  8:  Go back and check carefully whether you have read what exactly is there.   Have you missed to catch the double “The” in the panel on the left and have you filled the missing letters as you read the sentences in the panel on the right? Are you surprised that you could read and make sense even if half the letters are not present in the second panel?

5.  Time is an assumption:

We think of time as an irreversible arrow that propels us inescapably towards future. It also looks to us that there is a universal time along which the entire creation proceeds. In fact scientists believed in the absolute nature of time until Dr. Albert Einstein showed us in early 20th century that it was not so.  Quickly following this discovery, it was also established by Quantum Physics that time is not a one way street for small size matter like atomic and subatomic particles. The electrons or photons can happily travel from present or future to the past!

Even though we take time as a characteristic property that exists in the world we live in, we do not possess a sensory organ to sense time like eye sensing distance or light or ears hearing sounds. Time is an inference drawn by the mind based on the change we observe.  In the absence of a change, there would not have been any scope for us to detect time at all. How confusing and arbitrary is our concept of time can be illustrated taking a few examples.

i)  Suppose you are traveling from San Francisco, USA to Singapore by air via the Pacific route. Your plane departs at 11 P.M. as per the USA Pacific time on a Saturday night. You reach Singapore after flying for, say, 14 hrs. Your little granddaughter traveling with you wakes up and sees the early rising rays of the Sun and says it is Sunday morning. Her teacher taught her that Sunday comes after Saturday, week after week. But you say it is Monday 4 A.M. Your grand is hardly convinced of your wisdom that an entire Sunday could disappear into thin air when you get up after an overnight journey! How will you account for the missing Sunday?

(To Continue …. Part 7)

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