Cornflake

"You can observe a lot by just watching."

You can observe a lot by just watching.

—Yogi Berra

Perceptual Trans-identification

For more than fifty years now, I have been watching, introspecting, observing... how my perceptual apparati work as a means to more completely understand the psychedelic experience. I don't mean to impy that I spend a great amount of my daily hours researching the question, but merely that I have developed the habit of being on the lookout for clues when they might occasionally provide interesting "data"1. I have come to the conclusion that many of the "astounding" perceptual "effects"2 of psychedelic drugs are exactly what we experience normally, all the time, but that we automatically correct these perceptions — with a devastating efficiency — to accord with what we have come to believe actually exists.

My introspections have revealed a mis-identification phenomenon that happens much more frequently than we might suppose. We may "transidentify" things many times a day but without realizing it. Unless there is a reason to look more closely we may simply accept the apparent identity of all sorts of transidentified objects. I will call the phenomenon transidentification since the object of concern is identified as another known type of object rather than merely an unknown. In fact, I think we routinely pay more attention to an unknown than a transidentification, the former often piqueing our interest ("what the hell is that!) while the latter arousing little or no interest since we have automatically accepted the false identification. The transidentification phenomenon, I believe, provides important clues as to how the perceptual systems and their associated brain networks operate, and thus may support the idea that perceptual systems could efficiently "correct" perceptions that do not accord with what we believe is "reality". Perceptions during psychedelic experience that seem unusual, extra-real, unbelievable, are often actually the norm.

Here is a short example of transidentification, among several that I have recorded:

I am in the kitchen, preparing a late afternoon espresso. I glance over to the kitchen sink, where I will go to empty the espresso machine's coffee-holder. I see a corn flake on the edge of the kitchen sink. This area is directly underneath a cabinet where we stock our cereals, muesli, cornflakes, etc. and the corn flakes are stored in a large Mason jar. So when pouring out a serving, a flake or two sometimes falls by the wayside, near the sink. On the basis of these known facts and memories, therefore, I have no important reason to doubt that I am seeing a corn flake. The apparition arouses not the least curiosity, under the circumstances. The color is right, the location typical, so an in-detail analysis of my perception, a closer more careful look, is (automatically) deemed not necessary.

I go over to the sink, and try to swipe the cornflake off into the sink lest it otherwise fall on the floor and get stepped on, making a mess. I take a swipe with my hand, but the cornflake is wet! And I suddenly perceive it is (was) merely a large drop of water with some sunlight reflecting through it making it seem translucent/opaque and bright orange/yellow. The water had also lensed the light, producing what seemed to be the typical rough surface of a true cornflake, both the color and the surface appearance a figment of the wooden counter-top.

One could say that a drop of water here was even more likely than a corn flake spilled from the cabinet above, but it was the color and apparent opaqueness that caused the transidentification.

Another example, more spectacular perhaps, I have called the Dried Husk Incident in my catalog of recorded transidentifications. ...The other day, I went out on the porch and by the door is a small wooden stool that various objects including in/out mail gets placed on. When you come in the door, if you have something in hand you want to put down somewhere, the stool is the place to put it. Thus all sorts of objects could wind up on top of the stool. So, not particularly paying much attention as I was about to go outside, what seemed to be on the stool caught my eye: I definitely saw 3 or 4 "dark semicircular dried husks" lying on the stool. They seemed to be similar to some kind of insect pupa, or seed capsule collected off some tree or other plant. My wife might have collected something of the sort on a walk in the woods because of its interest, or whatever, and I looked fairly closely for a second or two trying to figure out just what these dark dry husks were all about. Just opposite, there is a low shelf absolutely overflowing with "unusual objects" collected by a procession of visitors, not only my wife and I: bird nests, roman tiles, fossils, minerals, insects, pine-cones of several species, you-name-it.

The vision of the "dried husks" persisted for a second or two (these things happen quite rapidly, you have to be ready for them to understand and remember what is happening). When suddenly... all was revealed: what I was actually seeing was a flat piece of wood with semicircular cutouts, it was an insert for a wooden wine case, each cutout where a bottle of wine would lay, protected. Lying on the stool the low-angle sunlight cast semicircular shadows just behind the cutouts, the light and time of day just right for creating the trans-identification. It is unusual that this particular piece of wood should be there, rather than in the wine cellar, so, "my perception" instead concluded that what I saw was an example of a more likely object, given the location and history of unusual objects in this vicinity: three seed capsules, lying there. And once you have "identified" the object *as* something, then you automatically, from memory, known facts, and knowledge, add the details of what that object should look like, such as surface texture and other features.

I cannot stress how sure and certain was my perception of the "seed capsules", also as with the corn flake, and yet, when I was pushed to look more closely, the true nature revealed really looked very little like the originally (erroneously) perceived thing. When examined more closely, the three shadows lost most of their formerly perceived qualities. In other words, I really did see 3 dried husks, or a corn flake, and then they disappeared, their features dissolving not in a puff of smoke but just disappearing tout court. One example even more astonishing I tell about elsewhere, and with that one, the perceived and revealed objects were both so intrinsically possible that for some time, staring at the revealed version, I could willfully transpose my perception back to the erroneously perceived object.

Yet another demonstration that we see is what we expect to see in some order of likelihood: what we "see" is not what the eyes-thalamus-visual cortex are presenting (for want of a strictly logical-operational term). So where and how is the "data" assembled to produce what some would call an illusion... But these are definitely not illusions of the nature of the faces/vase illusion or the endless stairway illusion. And what does this say about the (possible) "illusory" nature of much more that we see or hear (or think!) when we are not paying critical attention...

Someone who actually was on the lookout wrote me:

I had one driving the commute home when it first started getting dark outside. I pass several fields on the way, and at night I am always alert for animals. The speed limit is 50, so I’m always going about 60 when roads are sans snow. A reflection catches my eye, which I think are animal eyes peering out at me. I slow down, keep looking and see more, evenly spaced. Turns out they are stakes in the ground with reflectors on them. My caution was for nothing, but better to be safe than sorry! Just last evening on the way home from the grocery store I did see an orange tabby cat and a possum, fulfilling my desire to see the good old Vermont wildlife :)

I replied,

Close, but the grey-rock experience (described in KOSMOS, a much more lengthy example, with analysis) and dried husk incidents are a little different. In your driving example, the apparent reflections are perceived right away as unknowns, and being cautious as you say you pay attention to them trying to identify them. In my three examples, the perceived objects were not unknowns, but identified positively as the kind of objects I already knew about. For a brief moment I was satisfied with the perception, faulty although it was - I actually saw three husks, or a grey rock, or a corn flake, according to my habit routines of perception, and had I been distracted just then and led away to something else, I may well have, later in the day, remembered the grey rock and thought, "oh yeah, I guess I'll have to tend to that rock that has rolled down from higher up." And if I had been distracted just an instant after seeing the dried husks and continued on outside, I might later have asked my wife what those things were that she collected. Note: my chagrin at being fooled by this wine-case insert led to my using it as kindling for the evening's fire in the fireplace, a wine-case insert no longer to fool anyone!

It seems we identify such objects on a probability scale based on memory, facts and knowledge of what might be possible, etc., and not on their actual appearance that the visual cortex must certainly be "presenting" to us: for the grey rock, I automatically assumed there was a better chance it was a rock, and not a plastic bag, which would have been a less probable object in that location: I've seen many grey rocks on the paths, but few plastic bags that had a shape and color that might qualify as a grey rock. For the husks, I rarely see a wine case insert except in the neighborhood of a wine case down in the cave, and have seen dried husks et al. on the porch many times - there is a low shelf on the north side with a great selection of odd collected objects.

If you are on the lookout for such events, I think you will find they are quite frequent. Most are what I would call "sublunary" examples, like some lengths of grey gorilla tape resembling lengths of quartered grey PVC plumbing tube. The husk, grey-rock and cornflake incidents I call transcendental examples;>) And once again: the same thing must be happening with sounds, and... thoughts, impressions, ideas and all the rest. Tricky.

I've been looking at possible brain/mind explanations for the apparent fact that "we tend to see what we most expect to see", and also whether psychedelic training or an ongoing psychedelic experience might make such misidentifiactions more, or less likely...

1 I consider all computer-type terms as very suspect when dealing with human perception and psychology.

2 As for psychedelic effects, see my paper "Psychedelic Elephant".

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