[Every brain experiences reality differently. This census aims to
help us understand how human diversity encompasses not only
perception, but consciousness itself. See the link at the end of the
article to participate in the census. ]
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‘PERCEPTUAL DIVERSITY’ DESCRIBES WHO WE ARE  
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Oshan Jarow
February 11, 2023
Vox
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_ Every brain experiences reality differently. This census aims to
help us understand how human diversity encompasses not only
perception, but consciousness itself. See the link at the end of the
article to participate in the census. _

Human eye, by dullhunk (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

For something as intimate to our lives as perception — how we
experience ourselves and the world — we know remarkably little about
all the ways it can differ from person to person. Some people, for
instance, have aphantasia, which means they experience no mental
imagery
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while others have no inner monologue
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their heads, just silence. Studying what scientists now call
“perceptual diversity” is part of an increasingly mainstream
effort to learn more about consciousness itself.

Among the new wave of researchers who are trying to unravel the
mystery of consciousness in the lab is Anil Seth. Seth is the
co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and the
author of _Being You: A New Science of Consciousness_
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viral TED talk
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2017 popularized the idea of consciousness as a “controlled
hallucination
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which suggests that our perceptions are less like looking through a
transparent window on the outside world and more like watching an
internally constructed movie. When sensory data from the outside world
contradicts our brain’s movie, it updates the film.

Now Seth is behind another project that aims to “paint a
multidimensional portrait of this hidden terrain of inner
diversity,” he told me. By studying the subtle ways perception can
vary, we can understand the many different ways our brains construct
our realities. That’s why in 2022, Seth and his colleagues in
collaboration with the creative studio Collective Act
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Perception Census
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the largest psychological study of its kind. It aims to help bridge
the divide between philosophy and science by providing experimental
evidence for questions, such as how our individual minds differ, that
have long been out of reach.

The online survey gives participants a series of tasks, brain teasers,
and interactive illusions that each probe a different aspect of
perception, such as vision, sound, rhythm, how you experience the
passage of time, and even how your imagination works. It’s already
reached over 20,000 participants. “Just as biodiversity is important
for the health of an ecosystem,” Seth told me, perceptual diversity
“is something that enriches society.”

I spoke to Seth about what the perception census is, why perceptual
diversity matters, and how this all relates to the growing field of
consciousness studies.

_This interview has been edited for length and clarity._

WHAT GOT YOU INTERESTED IN A PROJECT LIKE THE PERCEPTION CENSUS?

My research and [that of] many others has led to this view that what
we perceive is not a direct readout of what’s there. It’s an
active construction in which the brain plays an essential role.
Because of the way perception works, it seems to us that we see the
world and hear the world as it is — it doesn’t seem like it’s
a brain-based construction
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Unless you interrogate that, it’s very hard to understand that
somebody might actually be having a different experience, even if
they’re in the same shared objective reality.

And, of course, we all have slightly different brains. So we’re all
going to inhabit different inner universes, and not a lot is known
about that. With this idea of perceptual diversity, what we’re
trying to do is bring back into the light this idea that, in fact, we
all differ, and the differences don’t have to be very large to
exist.

IS THIS THE FIRST TIME ANYONE HAS SYSTEMATICALLY STUDIED THE DIFFERENT
WAYS WE EXPERIENCE THE WORLD?

It’s definitely not the first time. There’s a long tradition of
looking for individual differences. But what’s distinctive about
what we’re doing is the scale, breadth, and reach.

[The Perception Census] has about 100 different things that people can
do, each probing different aspects. That scale hasn’t been attempted
before. That allows us to look at what the patterns are, and whether
there are underlying factors that explain how different aspects of
perception correlate.

BEYOND INTRINSIC INTEREST IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS, WHAT
COULD WE DO WITH A RICHER UNDERSTANDING OF PERCEPTUAL DIVERSITY?

One goal of the census is awareness-raising because people are
remarkably surprised when they realize that people can have different
inner experiences. But they’re also surprised just by all the
under-the-hood complexity involved in this everyday miracle of just
experiencing the world.

I also think it can cultivate a bit of useful humility about our own
perceptions and beliefs. If we really had this understanding that the
way I see things is not the way they are, then it’s easier to
understand that somebody else might see something differently. In a
world of increasing polarization and fragmentation, understanding that
we differ, and how we differ, can build platforms for empathy and
communication.

When it comes to mental health, neurodiversity
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a well-established community with lots of important lobbying efforts
that have done great work. But it tends to be associated with specific
conditions and reinforces this normative, neurotypical view for people
who aren’t neurodivergent in that way. What I’m hoping is that the
census can reinforce the recognition of diversity in the normative,
neurotypical range.

HOW DO YOU IMAGINE THIS KIND OF RESEARCH COULD EVOLVE IN THE FUTURE?

We can start to drill down. For instance, if we find some interesting
aspects of perceptual diversity that stand out, or some factor that
seems to predict diversity in different dimensions, then we might
bring people into the lab. We can do more fine-grained controlled
experiments, using things like brain imaging. We might begin to look
at the biological mechanisms that are responsible for this diversity.
We can’t do that in a large-scale survey.

Then we could also zoom out. There are limitations on what we’ve
been doing. We’re only looking at people who speak English. We’re
not really sampling across cultures as much as we would ideally like.
Also just for very boring ethics reasons, we’re only looking at
people 18 and over, so another whole range is what’s going on with
the development of perceptual diversity; that can be new terrain, too.

And we’ve got 100 tasks, but that’s a small subset of the possible
things we might want to ask. One of the things we were worried about
was that we’re asking quite a lot of people to spend their precious
attentional moments on something, so we have to make it rewarding for
them. And it turns out, we have 20,000 people already, and one comment
we received was that “this is what the internet is made for.”

IN YOUR BOOK _BEING YOU: A NEW SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS_, YOU WRITE
THAT ADVANCES IN THE SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS ARE “INAUGURATING A
TRANSFORMATION IN PSYCHIATRY FROM TREATING SYMPTOMS TO ADDRESSING
CAUSES.” I’M CURIOUS HOW YOU THINK THESE KINDS OF ADVANCES MIGHT
HELP SUPPORT THIS TRANSFORMATION.

Many different things can catalyze that move. The census is, in
itself, not telling us much about mechanisms. But it’s laying out
the territory. By seeing what correlates with what, that will give us
some indication of whether there are dials in the brain, if you like,
that you can turn, and they change perception in different ways, or
maybe if you turn it too far, you get something that can transmogrify
into mental illness.

So you need to know the lay of the land in order to understand the
kinds of mechanisms we’re looking for that may go awry in mental
health disorders. More generally, consciousness research is making
advances here.

Whether it’s psychedelics or computational psychiatry, there are
increasingly detailed mechanistic proposals for why people have the
psychiatric symptoms they do. The key thing that consciousness
research brings to that is a focus on their experiences, rather than
the behavioral symptoms of psychiatric and mental health disorders.

_If you’d like to help chart the terrain of perceptual diversity,
you can __take the Perception Census here_
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_Oshan Jarow [[link removed]] _@OshanJarow
[[link removed]]_ is a Future Perfect fellow,
where he focuses on economics, consciousness studies, and varieties of
progress. Before joining Vox, he co-founded the Library of Economic
Possibility, where he led policy research and digital media strategy._

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