Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [31]
Our perceptual glitches, then, can leave us vulnerable to exploitation, whether by politicians or pickpockets. They can make us dangerous unto ourselves and others, as in the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401. They can be disruptive, whether slightly (as when we realize that our eyes are misprocessing an image of a checkerboard) or massively (as when we discover that the sun does not revolve around the earth). They can be consequential (as when an imaginary mountain chain scuttles your career) or trivial (as when a puddle on the road evanesces as you approach). And they can be pleasurable, as when we gape at optical illusions or flock to magic shows.
Dangerous, disruptive, consequential, trivial, pleasurable: as tangential to error as they initially seem, perceptual failures turn out to showcase virtually the entire practical and emotional range of our mistakes. That’s one reason why I claimed earlier that they are the paradigmatic form of wrongness. But another and more important reason is this: illusions teach us how to think about error. Intellectually, they show us how even the most convincing vision of reality can diverge from reality itself, and how cognitive processes that we can’t detect—and that typically serve us quite well—leave us vulnerable to mistakes. Emotionally, illusions are a gateway drug to humility. If we have trouble acknowledging our own errors and forgiving those of others, at least we can begin by contemplating the kind of mistakes to which we all succumb.
Illusions make this possible, but they also make it palatable. In defiance of the pessimistic model of error—which can’t account for illusions, and therefore claims that they don’t count—we experience these sensory errors as fun, and pleasurable, and just about endlessly fascinating. This fascination begins very young (optical illusions, like knock-knock jokes, are a particular passion of elementary school kids) and doesn’t appear to diminish with age. In other words, illusions are not just universally experienced. They are universally loved.
This attraction to illusions upends our conventional relationship to wrongness. We are usually happiest when we think that we understand and have mastery over our environment. Yet with illusions such as mirages, we take pleasure in the ability of the world to outfox us, to remind us that its bag of tricks is not yet empty. We usually like to be right. Yet in illusions such as Edward Adelson’s checkerboard (where we can neither see the image correctly nor fathom how we could be seeing it wrong), we experience an agreeable astonishment that there was room for error after all. We usually dislike the experience of being stuck between two conflicting theories. Yet in another class of illusions—including the famous vases/faces and old woman/young woman images*—our pleasure lies precisely in being able to toggle back and forth between two different and equally convincing visions of reality. Finally, we usually do not care to dwell on our mistakes after they happen, even if it would behoove us to do so. Yet illusions command our attention and inspire us to try to understand them—and to understand, too, the workings and failings of our own minds.
Granted, it is easy, at least comparatively, to find pleasure in error when there’s nothing at stake. But that can’t be the whole story, since all of us have been known to throw tantrums over totally trivial mistakes. What makes illusions different is that, for the most part, we enter into them by consent. We might not know exactly how we are going to err, but we know that the error is coming, and we say yes to the experience anyway.
In a sense, much the same thing could be said of life in general. We can’t know where our next error lurks or what form it will take, but we can be very sure that it is waiting for us. With illusions, we look forward to this encounter, since whatever minor price we pay in pride is handily outweighed by curiosity at first and by pleasure afterward. The same will not always be true as we venture past these simple perceptual