Escaping Criticism: Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874

 

 

CONCEPT TO SEE:

CULTURAL HAZARDS: MISREADING MEANING – MISPERCEPTIONS AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS

 

 

 

Meaning is the product of a dense thicket of language processing activities in specific neural circuits of the brain. These processes produce the “meaning” that both emerges from and guides our thoughts and actions. Language processing elements are activated very rapidly — within a time frame of microseconds – in sequential and simultaneous patterns. Meaning reflects the results of the brain’s activities as it captures the massive number of diverse categories of sensory stimuli impinging on the brain, the mind, and “makes sense” of them. This is an extraordinary functional ability of humans — the miracle of meaning. But, the result can be messy.

It is a mistake to underestimate what is achieved when a language is learned — as we learn to extract meaning from a flow of sounds. Learning to speak a language is a complex process, but as a child absorbs language meanings over many years he is motivated to do so, and the process does not seem difficult. In fact, the entire process, from the sensory registration of sounds, through perception, to the understanding of meanings, is a formidable task that we negotiate so naturally that it disguises the host of accomplishments involved.

Consider the experience of learning another language – that first feeling of emerging confidence after knowing a first group of written words. Then, to one’s surprise, these words are not recognized when spoken by a native speaker, because the brain has not yet learned the skill of separating the words out of the auditory language flow. Therefore, if understanding meaning is more difficult than this, possibly the most complex component of speaking a language, we are reminded that we should expect the understanding of meaning to be a challenge.

Curiosity has always been aroused by perceptual misreadings. Perception brings together sensory information (e.g., smell, visual vertical or angled lines, auditory pitch and rhythm, etc.) across sensory modalities, and organizes it. Perceptual acts are generally not consciously experienced – their effects are embedded in our basic expectations and accepted as reality. Therefore, when the organization of perceptual features is changed in an unexpected way, it is surprising and worthy of comment. Examples of visual (optical) illusions are familiar, such as the Rubin vase that can be seen reversibly as two faces or as a vase; this is a “figure-ground illusion”.

 

 

Another is the “rabbit-duck illusion” in which the stimuli presented can be viewed as either a rabbit or as a duck. The meaning selected in response to the stimuli depends upon how the individual organizes the information (individual external visual signals) into a meaningful whole, as he spontaneously attempts to “make sense” of his world.

 

Observations of visual (optical) illusions are represented in our languages, such as the French phrase, now common in English and found in English dictionaries, “trompe l’oeil”. The literal meaning in French is to “deceive the eye”, and it is used commonly in reference to art that creates a visual illusion, such as of three-dimensional, highly realistic objects (e.g., the painting “Escaping Criticism”) or architectural spaces.

Perception makes meaning possible, yet, perception does not provide meaning itself, as understood in the conventional use of the word. Perceptual illusions warn us of our vulnerability to the steadfast assumption that “I see what is going on”, or “I know how to make sense of what people do”, or “no one can fool me”. If perceptual illusions are easily exemplified on a page, then common sense suggests that cognitive illusions, or misunderstandings, as they are described in daily life, can be much more difficult to present as examples. Cognitive illusions, or misunderstandings, are subject to extraordinary complexity, fueled by the massive amount of highly diverse types of information presented, in this manner carrying the potential for evoking frequent misunderstandings of the meanings of complex event sequences in each person participating or observing.

For example, a complex interaction sequence might, nevertheless, have a relatively simple behavioral concept at its core: a physical act, indicating affectionate intimacy, is intertwined with language (verbal and emotional) obviously describing physical threats to the “beloved”.

 

A TASTE OF LIFE

 

 

 

This can be compared to another complex interaction sequence in which the meaning is carried in a rapid, cognitively complex conversational exchange that describes both affiliative, friendly intentions and aggressive, threatening intentions in relation to a highly complex set of plans that require knowledge and intellectual preparation over time. The opportunities for misunderstandings are rife in this interaction; the observer recognizes this because it is difficult to even “keep up” with the conversation and its meanings as it occurs.

 

A TASTE OF LIFE

 

 

 

If misperception occurs with reasonable frequency, then it would seem likely that a more complex activity of the mind, the thinking (“cognition”) that recalls, organizes, and analyzes information, in order to construct meaning, make decisions, and take action, would be more susceptible to changes that would affect behavior.

The nature and frequency of “misreadings” in our thinking beyond the perceptual level – “cognitive illusions” in the most general sense — would be of considerable interest in relation to meaning, and to the nature of misunderstanding, as well as the effects on individuals, relationships, and cultures.

This has been appreciated from the time of ancient civilizations, which have cast meaning and altered meaning – misunderstandings, including deception – in central roles from the beginning of ancient sacred literature.

The inherent frequency and complexity of challenges to “make sense” of the potential meanings that we continuously encounter in language would appear to make cognitive illusions very common. If this causes a vulnerability to “misunderstandings”, this would put all individuals at risk of “misreadings”, especially those who resist the effort of being cautious — and readily accept explanatory shortcuts provided by the culture (not asking if this is a devious serpent or a source of wisdom) to “make sense” of the incoming language stimuli. For example, a gossip-derived, inaccurate “image assignment” of aggressive behavior to someone can be used by others as an easy, culturally accepted, solution to a complicated situation whose meaning is initially obscure, and for which the false assignment of causal aggressive behavior to someone is a conveniently simple solution.

 

 

THE SCIENTIFIC SPOTLIGHT

The psychologists Robert Remez, David Pisoni and their colleagues . . . published an article in Science on ‘sine-wave speech’. They synthesized three simultaneous wavering tones. Physically, the sound was nothing at all like speech, but the tones followed the same contours as the bands of energy in the sentence ‘Where were you a year ago?’ Volunteers described what they heard as ‘science-fiction sounds’ or ‘computer bleeps’. A second group of volunteers was told that the sounds had been generated by a bad speech synthesizer. They were able to make out many of the words, and a quarter of them could write down the sentence perfectly. The brain can hear speech content in sounds that have only the remotest resemblance to speech. Indeed, sine-wave speech is how mynah birds fool us. They have a value on each bronchial tube and can control them independently, producing two wavering tones which we hear as speech.

Our brains can flip between hearing something as a bleep and haring it as a word because phonetic perception is like a sixth sense. When we listen to speech the actual sounds go in one ear and out the other; what we perceive is language. Our experience of words and syllables, of the ‘b’-ness of b and the ‘ee’-ness of ee , is as separable from our experience of pitch and loudness as lyrics are from a score. Sometimes, as in sine-wave speech, the senses of hearing and phonetics compete over which gets to interpret a sound, and our perception jumps back and forth. Sometimes the two senses simultaneously interpret a single sound. .   .   .

Actually, one does not need electronic wizardry to create a speech illusion. All speech is an illusion. We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. This becomes apparent when we listen to speech in a foreign language: it is impossible to tell where one word ends and the next begins.

Steven Pinker (1994/2008). The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: The Folio Society, pp. 131 – 132.

 

 

VOICES

Now the serpent was cunning beyond any beast of the field that HASHEM God had made. He said to the woman, “Did, perhaps, God say: ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?”

The woman said to the serpent, “Of the fruit of any tree of the garden we may eat. Of the fruit of the tree which is in the center of the garden God has said: ‘You shall neither eat of it nor touch it, lest you die.’”

The serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die; for God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad.”

And the woman perceived that the tree was good for eating and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a means to wisdom, and she took of its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked; and they sewed together a fig leaf and made themselves aprons.

They heard the sound of HASHEM God manifesting itself in the garden toward evening; and the man and his wife hid from HASHEM Godamong the trees of the garden. HASHEM God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I am naked, so I hid.”

And He said, “Who told you that you are naked? Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”

The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me – she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”

And HASHEM God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done!”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Rabbi Nosson Scherman (editor) (1996). TANACH: The Torah/Prophets/Writings: The Twenty-Four Books of the Bible Newly Translated and Annotated. The ArtScroll Series/The Stone Edition. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Mesorah Publications, Ltd.

Genesis 3:1 – 13.