Composing Experience

Past experience and what you learn from it play a significant role in shaping your perceptions and your current experience. The examples we’ve looked at so far make that clear. That’s why you could recognize things like faces and vases, characters like B and 13, and four suites of playing cards — two red and two black — and more, and why you saw those things in the visual patterns presented earlier. You also learned from past experience that when force is applied to your body you must use effort if you don’t want to be controlled by that force. That’s why your first response when someone grasps your wrist to pull you hand off your head is to resist.

The knowledge you gain from past experience feeds your perceptual lens — shaping which bits of information you select from your perceptual stream and how you assemble them into the perceptual images that make up your current experience. We can incorporate that influence into the Perceptual Process model as shown below.

The Perceptual Process Model (2nd approximation)

The major element we’ve added to the model is the box at the top labeled Memory & World Knowledge. The term world knowledge here is meant to encompass the wide range of mental constructs that encode your knowledge of and beliefs about the world, and your understanding of it. As experience occurs, you encode it into memory and store those memories away for later recall. At the same time, you incorporate your experience into your larger store of knowledge about how the world works and what you can expect from it. These processes, through which experience creates memory and changes world knowledge, are represented by the upward flowing arrow in the figure.

You draw on past memories as part of your current experience — remembering, perhaps, the last time you visited the place you are now, or what it was you wanted to do when you were here again. You draw on your world knowledge to anticipate what will happen in the future, and to assess various courses of action open to you. These processes, of memory recall and the use of world knowledge in current planning, etc., are represented by the downward flowing arrow in the figure.

Your world knowledge also plays a role in your perception itself — determining what you expect and know how to perceive. The Possibility and Expectation arrow from Memory & World Knowledge to the Perceptual Lens indicates this influence.

Our earlier examples demonstrated that influence. You see faces or a vase because your world knowledge makes those meanings available as possible interpretations of that visual pattern. You see a B or 13 because your world knowledge picks out meaning consistent with the surrounding context. You misperceive a red spade because your world knowledge doesn’t contain a category for red spades. You resist someone pulling on your arm because your world knowledge tells you that otherwise he will pull it away.

Your world knowledge is complex and takes many different forms. It includes things you “know” intellectually, like the names and locations of streets in your city, as well as the less conscious and more implicit map you use to find your way around. It includes your sense of relationships between things of all kinds, how physical objects behave, and how people behave and interact. You can easily formalize and verbalize some of this knowledge, but much of it is stored in deep internal structures to which you have little direct conscious access.

Your world knowledge includes what you know about yourself. A subset of particular importance to the issues I’ll be exploring is what I’m going to call your somatic self-image — your internal model of yourself as a physical being. Moshe Feldenkrais was referring to this model when he said that “we act in accordance with our self-image.” I’m using the narrower term somatic self-image to distinguish it from the more narrative aspects of your larger self-image that are of more interest to psychologists. I see your somatic self-image, then, as your understanding of yourself and how you function in the world around you, which you use in composing your experience of yourself as a physical being with mass and volume who functions in a physical world.

To sum up, your current understanding of yourself and the world around you was shaped by your past experience, and in turn, it shapes your current experience. Your current experience contributes to your understanding, continually modifying and reshaping it. This new understanding then shapes your future experience, in a never-ending cycle of feedback between your experience and the world knowledge you construct from it.

Anatomically, this filtering and information processing takes place within your central nervous system (CNS), your brain and spinal cord. The components identified in the Perceptual Process model — your Perceptual Lens, Current Experience, Memory & World Knowledge, and the information flows between them — do not represent specific anatomical structures or neurological processes. Rather, they are conceptual abstractions that provide a way to think about the ongoing information processing in which you are continuously engaged. The line between, for example, the perceptual processing that we are attributing to the Perceptual Lens and the resulting images that make up your Current Experience is not sharp and clear. One shades imperceptibly into the other, and the dividing line between them shifts as you shift and refocus your awareness. Trying to deal with the full complexity of the human system would be overwhelming, so we need conceptual simplifications like these to reduce that complexity to a manageable level.