It’s 1824, and Louis XVIII has a problem. People are complaining about his royal tapestry factory in Paris. The factory displays vibrant fabrics in its showroom. But whenever a nobleman buys thread to take home, something seems off about the colors. The greens aren’t as verdant and the reds aren’t as rich.
Michel Chevreul, the king's chemist, investigates the problem. At first, he suspects that the yarn is degrading over time, or that perhaps the factory is using cheap, low-quality dyes. But, after years of experiments, he presents a surprising finding: there’s nothing wrong with the thread or the dye.
Instead, the problem is in the eye of the beholder. The colorful yarns simply appear more vivid when woven together in the showroom’s tapestries. In isolation, the lack of contrast makes them seem dull.
Chevreul stumbled upon a foundational truth about the science of perception – namely, that we never sense anything in isolation. What we perceive with our senses is always distorted. And our interpretation of the world can be affected by the context of present conditions, as with the case of the tapestries, or by context from the past.
To understand how past context informs present interpretation, consider the struggles some people have when learning foreign languages. In English, R and L sounds have separate meanings. Native speakers grow up learning to tell them apart. In contrast, Japanese doesn’t make this phonetic distinction. So Japanese speakers can have difficulty hearing the difference at first, because in their native context it simply wouldn’t matter.
Essentially, our brains learn what types of information were meaningful in the past, and get better at recognizing that information in the future. But while this is a useful skill, it can also make it harder to perceive things accurately.
For instance, we often overlook even the most common typos because our brains automatically fix them. Based on past and present context, our minds know which letters are supposed to be where and adjust our perception accordingly.
Even though context is so influential, we do have control over how we interpret the world. In fact, we have the power to adjust our perception of reality consciously.
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