As I returned from my morning walk, I saw a bright green note attached to my front door. Odd, I didn’t notice it when I left only 20 minutes prior. Maybe the mailman came early.
As I got closer to the door, the note seemed to vibrate then suddenly disappeared.
“Oh.” It wasn’t a note. It was a reflection from my neighbor’s colorful ATV parked in their driveway.
This banal experience actually points to some deeper truths about the relationship between our minds and the world.
Feeling and Thinking
There is a difference between your sensations and your interpretations of them. Usually, sensation and interpretation are seamlessly unified—we automatically blend our sensations and interpretations together. When you say, “I stubbed my toe on the table,” we really believe that we stubbed our toe on the table—that is, we believe we inhabit a world of three-dimensional space filled with tables and toes that are stubbable.
Normally, this system doesn’t cause too much trouble. We probably do live in a 3D world where our theories about “toes” and “tables” are good enough for practical purposes. However, sometimes it is critically important to distinguish sensation from interpretation—it’s a matter of life or death, guilty or not-guilty.
Sensation and interpretation are often so tightly synced, it takes deliberate practice to de-sync them. It’s natural to feel like our sensations are just as “real” or “true” as our interpretations of them, but sensations cannot be wrong in the same way that interpretations can. My morning walk provides us with a nice illustration.
What Do You See, Really?
As I returned from my morning walk, what did I see?
Clearly, I did not see a note on my door. It’s tempting to say, “I really saw a reflection,” but even this is not solid enough. I might be mistaken about it being a reflection.
What I really saw was a patch of green. A green blob in my visual field, surrounded by other blobs of color. I interpret these blobs as physical objects—a “note” or “reflection” on my “door,” but I might be wrong in my interpretations (for example, if I mistook my house for another).
Even if I was hallucinating or dreaming—if there was no door at all—I really did see a green patch of color. I might be wrong about my theoretical interpretation of my sensation, but I can’t be “wrong” about the facts of my sensation, assuming my memory is reliable.
Even in Court
Martha takes the stand and testifies that she really heard gunshots at 9pm sharp. The defense asks, “Walk me through that evening. What exactly did you hear?”
She responds, “I heard people yelling, a loud BANG, followed by people screaming.”
The defense responds, “How do you know it was a gunshot and not, say, fireworks? It was the 4th of July, after all.”
“Well… I guess it could have been.”
Shoulder or Kidney?
Until the age of 21, I dealt with nasty shoulder pain that seemed to be caused by exercise. I saw a bunch of doctors, but nobody could figure it out. (I distinctly recall my basketball coach thinking I was making it up.)
The closest I got to a satisfactory explanation was a doctor who ran an MRI and said I might have a micro-tear that wasn’t showing up on the scans.
Fast forward to January of 2011, when I discovered that I had a congenital abnormality with my kidney. I got laparoscopic surgery and then noticed, over the following months, I was no longer getting shoulder pain. I had no idea why, until I talked to a nurse who told me she experienced the same thing. For some reason, the congenital abnormality was irritating my phrenic nerve, which caused referred pain up to my shoulder. The phrenic nerve is connected to the diaphragm, which explained why the pain was exercise induced.
Here’s another example where the interpretation is critically important. For years, nobody could figure out what was wrong, and at least one person thought I was making the sensation up—that it was in my head—because they lacked an interpretation that made sense to them. But I wasn’t making it up; I was not wrong about the existence of the sensation. I just didn’t have the right interpretation of the sensation; in fact, I would have sworn under oath that something was wrong with my shoulder, when in reality the problem was with my nerve.
This pattern repeats itself over and over across different domains and aspects of life. In most cases, we can keep our sensations and interpretations in sync without too many problems. But sometimes, it becomes necessary to de-sync and carefully distinguish between an experience and the theoretical interpretation of it.
