Hallucinations
Here’s a statement worth unpacking:
Perception is controlled hallucination.
(This statement comes from a book I’m reading called Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind by Andy Clark.)
Perception = what we notice (even unconsciously)
Is = linking verb
Controlled = based on best guesses, which are constrained by experience
Hallucination = our projections onto the world
In other words,
What we notice (even unconsciously) is based on best guesses, which are constrained by experience, about our projections onto the world.
What Clark is getting at is that we humans know about the world through predictions. From the moment we are born (and maybe even before), we are gathering data from inside and outside our bodies and organizing those data into expectations, into patterns that allow us to make sense of what is happening right now and guess what is going to happen in the future.
We are, Clark claims, “prediction machines.”
This means — and this is important — that the data we collect from the world is not pure and objective. It means that we actually select data from the world based on what we expect. We project — hallucinate — our expectations ahead of us and, when the data from the world corresponds well enough to those projections, we feel we know.
Some common hallucinations:
our narratives of who we are and how the world works
our biases
our stereotypes
our beliefs, positive and negative, about ourselves and others
Why does this matter to teachers? Because our perceptions drive everything we do in the classroom. If I expect an insult from you, I hear/hallucinate what you just said as an insult. If I expect a certain student in my class to be a smart ass, then it’s almost impossible for me to read him as anything but a smart ass, no matter what he actually is (and, guaranteed, he’s more than just a smart ass).
As I often tell my clients, we find what we’re looking for, even if what we’re looking for has nothing to do with reality. That is, we hallucinate all the time. Especially when we’re stressed. It’s much harder to be open and think generously when we feel anxious and unsafe.
There’s no blame here, by the way. When you consider how difficult it is to be a bounded organism that knows only what happens in and to itself with no actual idea of what happens in and to anybody else, it’s a miracle we can relate to each other at all. Teachers who spend their days looking at a sea of faces, all of which are ripe for projection — “He hates me”; “That kid doesn’t know what I’m talking about”; “She is so bored!” “I suck as a teacher” — know this better than many.
So, as prediction machines, we function through hallucination. But we’ve also — thank god! — got agency. Which means we can stop ourselves in our hallucinatory tracks, make the deliberate decision to get curious about ourselves and others, and ask some questions.
Like
How would I describe what just happened?
What am I feeling? What if I made the flip?
What is it like to be someone else? Can I ask them?
And many, many more. Because, it seems to me, the antidote to our natural hallucinating is
connecting
with actual other beings.