How PEARL helps us see the world in a new way (or is it how we are meant to see it?)
- ntyler31
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
As we increase the sophistication of our capabilities in using the facilities in PEARL, it is becoming clearer that the 'usual' way of looking at the world is insufficient for creating understanding. This challenges our understanding of science and engineering to a considerable degree. PEARL resides in the world of thinkers such as Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, each of whom challenged not just the status quo, but what we might call the "status intellectus", the way of thinking about knowledge (or what Kuhn called "Normal Science").
The way we build our perception of the world uses vision, hearing, smell, taste and other senses as pathways between the environment, with its light, sound, and chemical composition, and our brain. But the brain does not 'see' light, 'hear' sound, 'smell' or 'taste' chemicals. It receives electrochemical signals, One electrical spike is very much like another. So how does the brain build our perception of the world?
Here is an example. When we were testing potential alert sounds for e-scooters, we tested the participants' preconscious responses as the e-scooter appeared in their peripheral vision. The image is an example of the brainscanning (EEG) data from one participant. The image consists of two plots. The upper plot shows the response associated to the visual cortex 372 milliseconds after the scooter appeared in the peripheral visual field. The appearance of the scooter in the peripheral field is shown by the vertical line at 0 milliseconds. The peak 372 milliseconds later shows the activity in the visual cortex as recorded by the EEG sensors, and enumerated as around 600 microvolts.
The lower plot shows the similar response by the same participant when the scooter appeared in the peripheral visual field, but this time the scooter was emitting an alert sound. What we see here is the appearance (vertical line at ) 0 milliseconds) and the peak (this time a little earlier than the previous example, at 352 milliseconds). But this time the activity associated to the visual cortex is enumerated at around 350 microvolts.
Look at the difference between the peak in the two plots. It is clear that the lower plot, which recorded the response to the e-scooter sound, is much lower than in the upper plot where the scooter had no alert sound.
The difference between the reaction to the scooter was also recorded by the aprticipant, by indicating a reduced sense of surprise in the case with the alert sound.
The key here is not the data, or the physics of the sounds, but that sense of surprise. The measurement of the sound, in loudness frequency, shape, etc. will only be very rudimentary, and because it is recorded digitally, it is really a set of discrete records of a continuous sound - in other words only a partial record. Similarly the visual recognition of the scooter in the peripheral visual field will be interpreted by a set of discrete recordings of photons with their characteristics of frequency/wavelength, brightness/darkness. Yet the brain associates the two sensory stimuli so that it can reduce the sense of surprise at the sudden appearance of the e-scooter.
Physics and engineering can give us an idea of the light and sound as a guess at the status quo, the world as it might be. But they cannot give us the surprise of seeing the scooter, or how that feels to the person experiencing the event. It is that feeling that is important for our survival. Eye witnesses to accidents or other sudden events are notoriously bad at remembering facts correctly. This is because the signals arriving in the brain via the sensory pathways generate a guess, an illusion, of what the event was. The shock of the event is there, but although this is the most important it is the least measurable part of the process. The detail, for example, the colour of a car, is less important to our survival than the fact that it was there. The brain makes up its perception of the world as a series of guesses based on 'the last time I experienced these stimuli'. Most of these guesses are unknown to us. We are made aware of only a tiny fraction of these guesses through our conscious awareness.
This fuzzy way of seeing the world cuts right across our obsession with precision and accuracy in measurement. Our vision is only receiving data maybe a third of the time, yet we have the impression that we are seeing continuously. The gaps are filled by those guesses that the brain makes, and how we react to them.
Of course we can measure the environment, to increasing levels of precision. But when we 'measure' the environment, we are only taking a set of discrete samples of a continuous process, and we can define such a sample in many different ways. Our brain aggregates continuous information, like sound, in order to help it understand effects such as rhythm for example. It processes vision discretely because the eye is only taking in data intermittently. Vision processing is also very slow compared to the speed of processing hearing. The human brain combines all the multisensorial information in order to form its guess about the world. This is how we can cope with the variability of the environment in which we live so that we can survive.
PEARL is about how to understand that conversion between the contiuous processes in the environment and the continuous processes inside the brain to provide us with the basis for deciding. This means looking rather sceptically at the usual ways of measuring the environment, which might work for physics, but don't work for the person. This is how people can see things in very poor light, musicians can play in appalling acoustics, chefs can taste the subtleties of a sauce in the midst of other smells and tastes and so on.
However, that capability to see, hear, smell, taste, feel under poor conditions, which is so crucial for our survival, comes with a cost. How much cognitive load is required to process the information in unhelpful circumstances? Is this a source of mental overload that can challenge some people to the extent that they cannot cope?
We need to consider the engineering nd design of the environment in terms of the combinations of experiences that humans perceive, not just in terms of what each engineering principle requires us to calculate. Humanising engineering and design in this way is what PEARL is aiming to help. But what is clear is that we have to change the way we look at science and engineering at the level of basic principles in order to understand how we can make the environment better suited to human needs. In PEARL we think that the arts might be one way that we can begin to understand the way the environment communicates with the person. This is why we have our ASPIRE programme, and why it is so important.