The Inner Frontier - The Limits of Human Perception

By: Aiden Kim

Take a look around you. What is it that you see? You’d say something along the lines of “I am reading a passage on perception on my computer screen.” Okay, but look further. Within the passage, what is there? You’d probably say something along the lines of “words, duh.” okay take it a step further. What do you see within the words? “Letters?” within the letters? “Pixels?” and further? “Idk atoms?”

We can go on and on with this going deeper and deeper into the scale of the universe, yet one thing remains constant: our universe is much more complex than your brain makes it out to be. Most of the time in our lives, our brain is constantly looking towards the feeds of information it is given.

Each of your essential primary senses are as follows:

Visuals: eyes

Sounds: ears

Smells: nose

Touch: skin

Tongue: taste

And finally vestibular: balance

From the eyes showing sight and hearing from your ears to even the vestibular sense of balance, your brain is constantly collating information from all 6 of these sources to feed you your idea of reality into your brain.

This process is in of itself a huge task for your brain, however, and takes the brain an enormous amount of effort to identify and understand the stimuli around it. Thus to mitigate the huge bandwidth requirements the brain selectively takes information from its brief sensory memory and collates it into the information that you retain in the form of short term memory. Thus you remember only things you pay attention to, rather than everything in a given situation.

Going back to the initial question, your brain doesn’t remember all that it sees. All it remembers is the words that it perceives and simplifies that context further into long term memory. The same principle applies to other senses, where, though you don’t remember exactly what degree you were at when leaning over to pick up a rock as a kid, your mind still remembers a simplified version of those events in the form of long term memory converted from short term memory, which is then in of itself converted from brief sensory memory.