A fascinating edition of Horizon last night, BBC 2's serious science programme. It looked at work that various mostly psychology groups are doing to understand what illusions (optical and auditory tricks, conjuring and so on) can tell us about the way in which our brains make sense of the world around us.
A couple of things stood out – first of all, that our senses are completely interconnected and rely on each other to provide a coherent whole (for example – we really do eat with our eyes… and our ears as well, it seems).
But secondly, to be able to make sense of our surroundings, and to do so at a speed that doesn't lead to us carrying around our brains in a wheelbarrow, we subconsciously fill in a lot of gaps with what our brain expects us to see/hear/feel/smell or taste.
From an evolutionary perspective this ability stems from having to make quick, life-or-death decisions: is that a tiger hiding in the bushes, or just a trick of the light? Let's just get out of the way in case, eh? (Incidentally, this explains why, particularly in low light, we can completely scare ourselves by catching glimpses of things that aren't really there).
We don't, generally, these days find ourselves confronting tiger-laden bushes. So this ability to fill in the gaps can be a challenge. The concept of generalisation as put forward in the cult of NLP talks about how people often find themselves talking in terms of how others 'always' or 'never' do things, thus closing their minds to possibilities based on stereotyping.
In the IT world, these ways our brains work based on experience and assumption are often ignored (to our peril). I'm typing this on my work BlackBerry. The red 'on' button is a classic case… the visual message being sent is contrary to the function that is provided and, from experience, lots of people struggle to find the on button even though it's staring them in the face.
It's also got me thinking about some of the constant learning challenges that the continuously updating world of Cloud poses. How much unlearning of stuff will some people have to do before they are able to see the things that are in front of them, rather than what their brain is telling them is in front of them?
mmitII 
“Unreality”
(after Horizon's 'What Is Reality' shown on Monday, 17th Jan 2011)
How far can poets go, then,
down into 'icle physics?
To discover parts of subatomic mass,
so small it is beyond minute.
And in just a second, what happens is
really unbelievable, beyond imagination.
Protons collide with protons
and create a random mess
of particles, so mini and invisible,
that they cannot find them all!
There's one they really had to find:
and in ten years, they found top quark.
So small it was that it could not be seen
or heard or measured, but they did…
they did, the clever buggers, they did!
I can see and hear and feel him
stirring in his grave; Albert is excited
at the very thought of contemplating
the distinct possibility that space-time,
(that is the space-time he invented)
could actually be outside the universe
or is that what he meant by relativity?
Is it perhaps, therefore inside itself?
Who will win the race to tell?
We know they'll find a smaller particle,
[they say they know already] of one that's
smaller than top quark, so small it couldn't be,
it couldn't even exist, until another brain
turned it round and called it by
a human name; Higgs-Boson is…
Well, he is like a wanted criminal
only, so romantic, all the greatest
physicists and philosophers of the world
want a piece of him, or her.
They have a huge accelerator,
deep under mountains, under ground,
where no harm can come to us.
They justify the billions by saying
that the quest is so enjoyable;
so much a part of human instinct
to enquire about the boundaries,
[if they exist at all] of our perception..
..of reality, by physics and philosophy.
The journey's worth the cost, they say,
but all the poets, they know so much more.
They know the nature of the universe
may be measured in very 'icle parts,
so small, so infinitesimally small,
that we suspect they are beyond
description using epithets. Oh no,
it's under the mighty spell of mathematics!
No earthly words suffice, not there.
Even the ancient Greeks didn't know this;
their Alpha has been squared, and will
Omega cubed and integration, calculus
return the answer they all crave?
Or will the search for ultimate smallness,
through fuzziness, get us to the end?
Is the start to finish of a shrinking universe,
rather like a journey round the Circle line?
So we could arrive back at the point
where it all started; where we all began:
Four dimensional Space-time Relativity.
The structure of the universe, a hologram?
Could we be a product of our imagination?
To recapitulate, then, we are in search
for something that is so damned small,
that we can't see it, hear it, measure it
in any human way at all!
And yet, theoretical physicists say
that one day soon, they will exclaim
Eureka! We have found Higgs-Boson!
But if they can't describe it mathematically,
the beginning and the end of everything
is the poetical imagining of unreality.
© 2011 John Anstie