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By Root 1056 0

Most of the ancient philosophers who studied perception (Plato and Protagoras, et al.) were concerned primarily with physical operations: with how the mechanisms of touch, taste, vision, olfaction, and audition interact with the properties of the world. But Kant was interested primarily in psychological processes, and he argued that our beliefs, desires, thoughts, and feelings also influence the way we perceive our environment. This contribution to the philosophy of perception was crucial, because it explained how we could get not just universal errors like mirages, but also individual sensory mistakes—how two people who see or hear the same thing can walk away with two entirely different impressions of it. Protagoras explained this by saying that reality varied. Kant said no, it is people who vary, right down to our ways of perceiving the world.

* The phantom limb and the phantom hat illustrate an important point, which is that we react to and interpret not just information from the outside world, but from our interior world as well. And sometimes—as in these phantom sensations—we misinterpret it. We will see another, even more dramatic example of this in the next chapter.

* Robert-Houdin’s work in Algeria is essentially an antecedent to modern military psychological operations, or psy-ops. Not all psy-ops involve the manipulation of perception, but many do. The Iraq War provides (at least) two memorable examples: the highly choreographed toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, and the much-publicized distortion and dramatization of the “saving” of Private Jessica Lynch.

* Both of these illusions feature a single image that can be interpreted in two different ways. In the first, focusing on the (white) foreground reveals a vase, while focusing on the (black) background reveals two faces; in the second, focusing on certain details reveals the profile of a beautiful young woman, while focusing on others reveals a distinctly less attractive older woman. I’ve reproduced both illusions in the endnotes.

* As that suggests, memories don’t need to be traumatic to induce the feeling of knowing. In fact, they don’t even need to be real. That’s the startling and provocative conclusion of false memory studies. In these studies, subjects are convinced, over a series of meetings with a psychologist, and with the consent and participation of their families, that they experienced something as a child which they did not: getting lost in a store, say, or taking a hot-air balloon ride. Overall, about one in four subjects will accept a false memory. (Among young children, the figure is significantly higher, ranging from 30 to 60 percent.) For these participants, the implanted “memories” become largely indistinguishable from reality—so much so that it can be difficult to convince them later that the event never happened. One fourteen-year-old subject named Chris, who was led to believe that he had gotten lost in a shopping mall as a child, responded to the debriefing of the experiment with incredulity. “I thought I remembered being lost…and looking around for you guys. I do remember that,” he insisted. “And then crying, and Mom coming up and saying ‘Where were you? Don’t you—don’t you ever do that again.’” Although the event was fabricated, when Chris searched his mind, he somehow encountered the affirmative feeling that he had been lost. In a sense, these false memories are no different from errors in flashbulb memories; Ulric Neisser “remembered” something that hadn’t happened to him, too. But most of us find them more disturbing, since they suggest just how baseless the feeling of knowing can be—and, accordingly, how radically our memories can be manipulated, deliberately or otherwise.

* Two far more common neurological problems, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in general, are also associated with confabulation. Older adults who suffer from these conditions often seem to confabulate in response to memory loss, as when your ninety-two-year-old mother fabricates her medical history for her doctor, or claims that