Mind Hacks

Hack #15. To See, Act

Think of perception as a behavior, as something active, rather than as something passive. Perception exists to guide action, and being able to act is key to the construction of the high-resolution illusion of the world we experience.

The other hacks in this chapter could give the impression that seeing is just a matter of your brain passively processing the information that comes in through the eyes. But perception is far more of an active process. The impression we have of the world is made up by sampling across times, as well as just by sampling across the senses. The sensation we receive at any moment prompts us to change our head position, our attention, maybe to act to affect something out in the world, and this gives us different sensations in the next moment to update our impression of the world.

It’s easier for your brain to take multiple readings and then interpolate the answers than it is to spend a long time processing a single scene. Equally important, if you know what you want to do, maybe you don’t need to completely interpret a scene; you may need to process it just enough to let you decide what to do next and in acting give yourself a different set of sensations that make the scene more obvious.

This school of thought is an “ecological” approach to perception and is associated with the psychologist J. J. Gibson. ¹ He emphasized that perception is a cognitive process and, like other cognitive processes, depends on interacting with the world. The ...