What if I told you that you’re partially blind? That right now you think you see the world as it truly is, but in actuality, you’re missing something. See, every time we open our eyes light shines onto our retina. Nerve cells called photo receptors interpret the light, transmit the information to our brain, and that’s how we see. But there’s a small area on our retina where there are no photo receptors. This is called a scotoma or “blind spot.” The reason you never notice your blind spot is because your brain is great at guessing what SHOULD be there, and automatically filling in the blanks. Sometimes we know what we want to see, and our neo-cortex turns that expectation into a kind of virtual reality, which means that some of the world we see is really just an illusion. These clockwork adjustments are inherent functions performed by the brain to compensate for what our senses cannot completely perceive. Now let’s talk about love. We get to know people by taking a few small clues that we have about them and processing it all through a neural filter laden with our own personal biases. We rely on our mind to fill in the blanks of their identity. We’re building an internal model —- a simulation that helps us predict what they’ll think or how they’ll feel. Of course, relationships get into trouble when the simulation meets reality, which begs the question: do we ever really fall in love with another person, or just with our idea of who they are? All of us have our own personal versions of people in our heads as though we’re looking at their reflections in different fun house mirrors. And it’s easy to make the mistake of overestimating or underestimating them. Most of the time we see what we want to see instead of what is really there. We get so thrilled of imagining people as miracles, as adventures, as these fine and precious things but, alas, what a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person. Think about how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. Think about the way you can and cannot see them. In the end, our images of them reveal a lot more about us than them. Because who they really are, their essence, that’s in their brains, not ours. And until the next high-school dropout from Silicon Valley invents a way for us to literally plug in to the brains of other people, we can never really know who they are. All we can do is arm ourselves with what we know to be true —- our feelings.” - John Green’s
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:55:17 +0000
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