Chapter 4     The Proactive Nature of Perception

One of the crucial points that emerged in the last Chapter was the idea that our eyes and ears are not totally passive organs, receiving information sent to them from the outside world. They are involved in an active process whereby our brain is able to impose its preexisting patterns or organising ideas onto the massively complex world around us, which would be too complicated to make sense of if we could not simplify it and organise it in some way.

This can be described as a two-way connection between the brain and the objects we perceive. As well as sensory nerves whose message travels inwards from the eye to the brain, we have effector or motor nerves carrying instructions from the brain to the eye or the ear guiding its physiological behaviour. That guidance is in turn guided by whatever sense the brain is making from the sensing of the object – by the continual reformulation of the pattern in the brain, which is the organising idea. Unless the organising idea becomes stuck or fixed in our neural network, which is an unfortunate situation that may happen as we get older, it will be constantly rearranged to take into account the next stage of our perception experience. This new or modified organising idea will then impose itself again upon the seeing or hearing operation – and so on in a circular process.

The sensory circuit

This two-way circuitry of our nervous systems is known as a sensory-motor loop. This Chapter could also be called the circular nature of perception, because the process of knowing depends on the flowing operation of this circuit. I have already mentioned the simplest example of cognition or knowing, where a single-celled organism that has no brain or eye uses its cell membrane as a sensory surface to detect changes in the fluid around it and then activates a simple effector mechanism to move away, if a toxic substance is detected, or if it is food, to move towards it. It continues this process, sensing again as the situation is changed due to the motor activity and the changing environment. That is the basic sensory-motor loop or circuit.

The circularity of sensing is a subtle idea that you might like to play with in your mind for a while. It is summed up by saying that our senses form part of an open circuit that completes itself with whatever it is we sense (thus becoming closed). The great German poet and scientist, Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “Every object, well contemplated, creates an organ for its perception.” Not only does each sense organ connect up with the object it senses, but the various senses work together to create the whole picture that our brain seems to require. In David Abram’s beautiful book, The Spell of the Sensuous, he said: “My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent way, and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a centre of forces, as another means of experience, as an Other. Hence, just as we have described perception as a dynamic participation between my body and things, so we now discern, within the act of perception, a participation between the various sensory systems of the body itself. Indeed, these events are not separable, for the intertwining of my body with the things it perceives is effected only through the interweaving of my senses and vice versa. The relative divergence of my bodily senses . . . ensures that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth.”

Awareness of this circular process may enhance your sense of seeing something or hearing it by giving you a stronger feeling of being connected – of being part of what it is you sense. Frederick Franck in The Zen of Spring wrote: “We do a lot of looking: we look through lens, telescopes, television tubes . . . Our looking is perfected every day – but we see less and less. We are onlookers, spectators . . . Quickly we stick labels on all that is . . . By these labels we recognise everything, but we no longer see anything.” An everyday example of this that comes to mind is the myriad of supposedly important public notices that are required to be posted on walls and doors in the workplace or the waiting room that everybody looks at but few people actually read. When we are not fully engaged with the objects of our perception it follows that our mind is not working as well as it could be and this might be expected to have some consequences within our self-regulating system. You will recall that our autonomous operation depends on the connections we make with the medium in which we live.

A closer look at autopoiesis

This self-regulating process of living systems is called autopoiesis, as I have said. Literally, autopoiesis means self-producing and it refers to the fact that the chemical and physiological industry of your body is essentially circular. Every cell in your body lives for a time and then dies and, in most cases, is replaced immediately by a similar cell. For some cells this happens every few days; for others only every few months. The basic structural units of the body are the proteins that are made up from smaller molecules called amino acids. The construction process is regulated by other small molecules such as enzymes according to a blueprint set out by the very basic molecule called DNA or deoxyribose nucleic acid. The cell structures that are formed are in the business of using the flow of molecules and energy that come in from the outside to produce, within the system, the same components that are needed to maintain the existing structures.

This can be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which also uses raw materials from outside, but in this case to generate an organised structure (car) that is clearly something other than the factory and whose existence will be independent of the factory in which it is made. Our self-producing molecular factory will rebuild every day the organised structures that make up who we are as long as sufficient raw materials are supplied. In a more general sense autopoiesis refers to the dynamics of any system that is organised and therefore not in equilibrium with its surroundings, i.e. it remains the same despite the flow through it of short-lived matter and energy. In fact it is this flow that enables the autopoietic system to maintain its essential organisation as a system.

Many biologists speculating about the origins of life have said that it began with the advent of the first self-replicating system. Self-replication is a process that involves the dividing of the DNA molecules into two so that each new organism can have a basic blueprint to develop itself into another autonomous unity. Maturana proposed that, before life began on earth, there were many molecules interacting with other molecules, but they had not formed into a self-producing arrangement in which the results of their molecular interaction would be the same molecular configuration again. This was probably happening occasionally in a haphazard fashion for a very long time until, one day, a living system ‘stuck’, as it were, and we have been evolving ever since.

From this notion of autopoiesis we get the idea of biological autonomy, which basically means self-governing. Everything that happens within our bodies happens in a way that is determined by the structural arrangement and pattern of interactions of our body. Although it is often triggered into action by some outside influences, what happens as a result of this trigger is only what is allowed to happen by the cellular and molecular arrangement within our bodies; it is not specified or determined by the outside stimulus. The traditional theory of stimulus and response might appear to contradict this and I will deal with that issue in due course. This is a quite different way of understanding the relationship between an organism and its environment. Maturana called this a structure-determined system; it is determined by its own structure.

A stark example of what it would be like if we were not structure-determined or internally determined systems is the story of King Midas who asked the Gods for the gift of turning everything he touched into gold. When his daughters ran up to give him a hug he touched them and they became frozen gold statues. That gift was a disaster. He really wanted them to remain structure-determined in order to be themselves – his daughters. All living systems have this property of running themselves; outside influences merely trigger a change, they don’t specify what that change will be.

This living system that we are is an autonomous unity. You can think of it in terms of its structure and also in terms of its organisation. Its structure is always changing and every new generation of a protein or an amino acid and every chemical or electrical change in your body is a change in structure. These structural changes are coordinated by having a common aim: to keep the organisation constant. Every structural change serves to maintain the essential organisation that must never be allowed to change because it is the manifestation of the unity as a whole – it is the essential wholeness that gives the individual its identity. When the unity that we are can no longer remain intact it disintegrates and we die. Our autopoietical nature is our selfhood and our life. To enable these structural changes (all the internal processes) to occur, this system must be structurally coupled to the outside world; it cannot exist by itself. Yet, at the same time, it will behave autonomously, meaning it will run its own operation. Autonomy does not mean being separated; it refers to a system that is self-governing by virtue of its connectability.

The principle of operational closure

A system such as this cannot exist unless it is a closed system in terms of its operation. For an entity to be autonomous, it must be connected or coupled to its surrounding medium in a certain kind of way, namely by an operationally closed coupling. This applies to you and me as well because we are autonomous unities existing by means of our connections to the world in which we live. What it means to be operationally closed is that everything that happens within your brain and body only needs a trigger or a bit of a push from outside and it will decide for itself what to do. Our life-sustaining activities like digesting food, breathing and circulating blood to provide oxygen and nutrients for the operations of each individual cell are totally self-governing as long as we are properly connected to the outside world – not living in a vacuum, so to speak. Of course these processes could be overwhelmed by some destructive outside force, but under normal circumstances, our internal workings run themselves and maintain themselves in an elegant self-managing way.

Therefore we say that living things are, in effect, both closed systems and open systems at the same time. They are open with respect to the intake of oxygen and nutrients and the excretion of waste products. They are closed in a semantic or operational sense in that what happens outside the boundary of the living system does not instruct or determine what happens within it. Outside stimuli are not unambiguous signals that have a predetermined result upon reaching our body. They are non-specific triggers (Maturana called them perturbations) so far as our body is concerned and it will not necessarily react according to the way the signal reads. We do notice a certain regularity when there is a typical reaction to a particular stimulus, which has led to the large body of theory about stimulus-response relationships. This theory has been useful in one way, but is also misleading in that it ignores or at least minimises the importance of biological autonomy as we shall see later.

For a rough analogy of a structure-determined system that is operationally closed you might think of the situation in a submarine that is submerged or an aeroplane pilot landing his plane in a thick fog. He watches the instruments and makes decisions according to their configuration because they inform him about his relationship with the outside world – the sea or the ground and the runway. The internal structure shown by the readings on the instruments is all he needs to know to do his job. If you compliment the pilot on landing in a fog he might say: “what fog? I was just using my instruments.” They did not dictate his actions, but he understood their meaning in terms of the very survival of his system and he used this knowing to avoid ‘extinction.’

When you think about it, a self-organising system could not be told what to do or be controlled by some external instructions and, at the same time, be running itself. It has to have a peculiar characteristic that we refer to as knowing or, to put it another way, it has to have a mind of its own. A further way of saying this is that it forms its own meaning as part of the process of autopoiesis; it does not receive this meaning from elsewhere in a preformed state. We tend to look for meaning outside of ourselves without realising that we are creating our own all the time; that is the nature of a cognitive system. Put more formally: a system whose "organisation defines a domain of interactions in which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself" is a cognitive system.

If you cast your mind back to the sensory circuit described earlier you may be able to put all this together in a satisfying way. It is the act of completing that circuit through the engagement of the perceived object with the process of perception that produces the operational closure. In physiological terms the sensory-motor circuit is internal in that the sensory nerve endings on the edge of our bodies are connecting with and correlating their activities with the brain from which the motor nerve activity is directed. In terms of the operation of the mind, however, it is a larger circuit that extends to the object itself. When Rupert Sheldrake wrote about the ‘extended mind’ he suggested that a special sense could be involved, but my point is that it is a perfectly normal operation of our regular sense organs to complete a circuit in the way that produces what the cybernetics people call operational closure.

Knowing what we sense and sensing what we know

Another example might help to make this clearer. Hudson Hawkland used microprobes placed in the auditory neural pathways of a cat to ‘listen in’ to its hearing. The cat had a lever-operated box containing food (fish), but the lever only worked when a tone was sounded. Sounding a tone that the cat had never heard before at first produced no responses whatsoever in the auditory pathways. As the cat learned about the tone its physiological hearing response began to fire. Without sensory-motor closure (or correlation) there was no interpretation of sound - the cat could not ‘hear.’ It might make us feel a little more tolerant of our children's behaviour when they are in a totally new situation and claim not to have heard what they were told. We could be forgiven perhaps for failing to see a new type of sign on the side of the road when driving in a town we have never visited before.  It seems that, if our brain does not know about something, at least to some extent, our nervous system is incapable of sensing it because the sensory-motor loop cannot be put into operation. It is also true that we sometimes notice something because it is different, but that depends on where we are putting our attention, which we will consider shortly.

An example Maturana used is that of a single-celled organism called an amoeba having its dinner, as it were, by engulfing a protozoan. Molecules released from the protozoan trigger membrane changes in the amoeba which enable it to spread itself in the direction of its prey until it eventually wraps itself completely around the protozoan. We can explain this process as being achieved by the amoeba maintaining an internal correlation between its sensory and motor surfaces. This correlation is maintained through processes inside the cell that are proper to this particular unity. In more complex organisms the principle is the same. The sensory surface may be connected to the motor apparatus by a complex network of nerves, but it is still a sensory-motor coordination (a cyclic detecting and acting) that is occurring. We are not saying that this is an instructive signal or a message being received and acted upon. We are saying it is the maintenance of the internal correlation that is crucial to knowing what to do. Through operational closure and autopoiesis, the organism is able to operate with relevance to the maintenance of itself in any particular situation. Cognition is not merely sensory-motor coordination, but that is the essence of it.

The idea of cognition or knowing in popular usage is usually associated with information processing like a computer, as I said before, but we are regarding it here as fundamentally linked to the concept of autonomy. Biological autonomy means that the way an organism specifies itself through its interaction is not separable from the way its cognitive performance is understood. If we want to speak about information then we are talking about a process of construction rather than instruction; a matter of internal coherence rather than representation. In the old-school model, information is that which is represented or it is at least a certain correspondence between symbols in one structure and symbols in another. In this new biology information is co-dependent or constructive and we recognise a correspondence only in terms of the structural pattern by which the two are connected. We do not say that the nervous system maps its surroundings as such, but that its form must be able to match and fit the shapes or patterns in its domain of interactions. Thus the information is only specified in its operation; it is not to be found ‘out there.’ It is formed within - as suggested by its Latin roots: in formare. As Francisco Varela put it: “it exists nowhere except in the interlock between the observer, the unity and their interactions.”

There are many implications for our living from the realisation that we are closed in this way. It explains why we would not be able to see exactly what is there; we see what our brain thinks is there, from its previous experience. To the old saying ‘seeing is believing’ we could also add that ‘believing is seeing.’ Your imagination shapes your world in that it forms the world you see and hear into patterns that are meaningful in terms of your previous experience. In the movie: What the Bleep . . . ? there is a story in which a native tribe witnesses the approach of a large sailing ship on the horizon and they do not know what it is. Imagine the Aboriginal people around Botany Bay when the European ships first arrived wondering for a time if they were clouds on the horizon or even some kind of bird. They were familiar with boats, of course, but probably not with ships of that size.

What these examples and others mentioned in the previous Chapter have in common is a property of operational closure which is achieved by the establishment of a sensory circuit that, while it consists of the maintenance of internal correlations, paradoxically exists only through the connection between our brain and what is out there in our world. This brings us to the point that cognition does not primarily mean knowing something about the rest of the world; rather it means knowing one's self through our interactions with the rest of the world. We rely on these interactions to maintain our integrity vis-à-vis everything else. We will expand on that later.

We make our own meaning

The most important implication of the principle of operational closure is that we form our own meaning at all times and cannot receive it already formed from anywhere else. In a strict biological sense meaning is simply not transferable; you cannot give it to anyone else. This semantically or operationally closed nature is a strict condition of our operation as cognitive beings. The language we use, both words and body language, does provide a sort of Trojan horse to partly overcome this problem by sneaking in some pre-arranged meanings for particular words or gestures, but this falls far short of a successful transfer of actual meaning for various reasons. We will discuss the use of language and the problem of transferring meaning in subsequent Chapters. The point to make here is that we often assume that others have acquired from us the same meaning we have formed when this is not the case at all. This is one of the most important blind spots.

The study of medical case histories of people whose brains have been damaged are not strictly relevant because they do not have the normal connectability that we take for granted, but there are some unusual cases that help to show this stark truth about having to create your own meaning.. One extreme case is a person who had lost the ability to perceive whether an object is moving and is rendered quite helpless in our modern world. It is very difficult to convey to another person the meaning of movement in every situation. The ability to perceive movement is so basic it is apparent in quite primitive animals. An early paper of Maturana and co-workers called ‘What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain’ concerned this; at that time researchers were mainly concerned with the input side of the loop. The crippling effect of not being able to sense motion contrasts sharply with what I was saying in the last Chapter about the sense of movement being essential for appreciating beauty in music, painting and poetry. The stories in our brain never stand still.

There are also case histories showing the importance to our mind of recognising faces. That clearly has priority, in terms of brain resources and activity, over recognising objects; perhaps because faces have a much greater significance for us in terms of the meaning in our lives. Some people with brain damage can see the details of faces, but cannot put it all together into a recognisable whole, which has a devastating effect on their lives. To lose the ability to form meaning from looking at another’s face is a crucial blow to the fundamentally autonomous business of the mind. You may have noticed that it is much harder to recognise pictures of famous faces, or your friends, if they are upside down? The wholeness does not form in the same way even though the details are still there. Other patients who could not distinguish between common objects face enormous difficulties and you can keep telling them what something is, but the meaning does not stick.

The crucial business of attention

Our attention system is highly selective, of necessity, because we could not take in everything at once. We have the ability to concentrate on one set of things while relegating all the rest to the background where it may be missed altogether or may float around the periphery of our attention. An interesting experiment by psychologists at Harvard showed what they called ‘change blindness’ in which the subjects did not notice something that occurred right in front of their eyes and were incredulous when told of this later. One person behind a desk handed the volunteers a consent form to sign and then ducked down while another person stood up and received the form when it was filled in. Most volunteers did not realise it was not the same person.

A powerful quotation from the radical Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, sums it up: "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." The corollary to thinking about our attention system is being aware of the blindness to which we referred earlier. The selective nature of our attention is another aspect of our blindness.

There is a popular picture book called Animalia in which a small figure of the author, Graeme Base, is partly hidden on each page, but he is very hard to find. We are not so blind that we can’t see him; it’s just that there is so much detail in those pictures. We can only attend to a small portion of what is going on out there in our world. We attend to what our brain thinks is important for us to be connected with at that time. There is a saying: “show me what you attend to and I will tell you who you are.”

Bringing forth our own worlds

It is a consequence of the physiological and behavioural processes involved in being human that we will not necessarily see what is there to be seen or hear what is there to be heard; we will see and hear what our brain thinks is there. The same principle applies to our other senses as well. We have pre-existing patterns in our brain that have been created as we put together our story. We have to make meaning, of course; that is one of the three essentials of life, but facts don’t make meaning; nor do bits of information make meaning. It is our story that makes meaning. In the operation of our brain there is always a larger context, the bigger picture or coherent story into which everything we encounter with our senses has to be fitted. This story is our own unique story and it defines who we are. It is emotionally charged, like all stories. If there was no emotion in it there would be no meaning. It is made up of patterns of meaning that connect us with the world and thereby shape the particular world that we bring forth.

Therefore my encounter with the world will not be exactly the same as the next person’s experience. Each of us lives in a slightly different world and this has an emotional basis.

Wittgenstein wrote that “happy people live in a different world from unhappy people.” Robert Zajonc showed how even the decision-making function of the mind operates within an emotional context. When subjects were presented with tones they had unwittingly heard recently they showed a distinct preference for them over tones they had not just heard, although they did not give this as the reason for the decision. In other words, what is familiar feels better even when we think we are judging rationally. In another study subjects who thought they were getting a narcotic or an alcoholic drink responded quite differently when given the drug or drink than those who thought they were getting a sugar pill or water. What we experience in the world depends upon how our mind thinks and feels about that world.

This is the nature of the process of perception. As Varela explained: “It is not a process of representation of an independently existing world, it is a continual bringing forth of a world which is defined by oneself and defines oneself at the same time.” Maturana coined the term ‘multiverse’ to refer to this phenomenon of our perception that there are as many different worlds as there are people perceiving them. There is a very ancient saying from the Talmud: “We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.” This brings us to acknowledge two different aspects of our perception process – a duality about what we are doing. We are not only experiencing, we are observing. The world we bring forth is the world we see. Seeing it is done by an observer whereas knowing about it includes having the experience. We will tackle this in the next Chapter.

For most practical purposes it usually appears that we are living in the same world as everyone else. This is because those of us with similar backgrounds of education and experience who live in a fairly well defined culture tend to have very similar organising ideas and reasonably similar stories. You may still be surprised, however, to find that someone you think you know well has a very different viewpoint about something. That might not create a serious problem, but it could hamper your communication with that person, especially if neither of you is aware of the biological process whereby we bring forth individual worlds. Dealing with the more profound cultural differences that exist in the world today is an undeniably important issue, however. We will certainly need to develop a better quality of communication amongst all human beings to solve some our most pressing problems. I think that cause will be served by an increasing awareness of the science of mind and body.

What we have been describing here as the proactive nature of the perception process has many ramifications we will need to consider further as we come to grips with the more subtle aspects of the operation of our human mind. In the next section we will consider two different approaches we may take when explaining our experience to one another.