Composing Experience

The Perceptual Process model describes the information flows we use in the composing experience. I want to shift focus now to look at some of the ways we manage that information. Two major processes through which we do that are awareness and attention. As a simplistic first approximation, we might say that awareness makes information available for use, and attention is how you prioritize that information. Using William Shakespeare’s metaphor that “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players,” we can think of awareness as how you light the stage, and attention as where on the stage you look.

The terms aware and awareness have many shades of meaning, all of which generally relate to availability of and access to information. Being aware of describes a relationship between an observer and something being observed. You can use information that you are aware of in composing your experience and your actions. That part of the perceptual stream is accessible to you at that moment. The term awareness also refers to the faculty through which you acquire information, as in broadening your awareness to take in more of your surroundings or narrowing your awareness to focus on a particular task.

I’ll use the term perceptual field to refer to the totality of information encompassed by your awareness at any particular time — the field of view, in effect, of your perceptual lens. This field is multi-dimensional, made up of different sub-fields corresponding to different perceptual dimensions, so I’ll sometimes use terms like visual field or proprioceptive field to refer to these sub-fields. Your perceptual field isn’t constant; it constantly changes. The content of the field changes from moment to moment, as the world around you changes and you change your relationship to it. The shape of the field — how much you take in from which different dimensions — also changes over time, as your interests and and your focus change.

Not everything taking place within your perceptual field is of equal interest or importance. Attention is the faculty with which you pick out and focus on what is important, and separate it from the background that matters less. Walking along and window shopping you attend more to products that interest you than to products that don’t. When you come to a corner, your attention shifts to the traffic light and patterns of traffic, so you can cross the street safely. Right now you’re probably attending more to what you’re reading than to other things going on around you, or within you. If something important occurs, though, if the phone rings, if there’s a loud noise nearby, or if the gradual filling of your bladder passes the threshold of discomfort, your attention will be drawn away from reading and toward that new stimulus.

Your management of your attention and awareness plays a major role in the kind of experience you compose for yourself, and in how well it serves you. If you are like most people, you manage theses processes largely through unconscious habit, with little or no conscious choice. You are making choices, nonetheless, whether you make them consciously or not. If you want to improve the quality of the experience you create for yourself, then it behooves you to examine the way you manage those choices and look for ways to improve that management. My intention in this blog is to help you do that.

The range of information accessible to you — the potential scope of your perceptual field, if you will — is limited by the inherent capabilities of the human nervous system. Without technological aids you simply cannot detect electromagnetic radiation outside the visible range and sound waves outside the audible range, for example, or slight variations in air pressure and humidity.

Those limitations notwithstanding, the amount of accessible information that most people use most of the time is pretty small. An overall lack of awareness — taking in and using too little information in a generalized version of tunnel vision — is perhaps the most pervasive and dysfunctional form of information mismanagement in people today. Later on we’ll examine why that is and what can be done about it. First, though, lets look at some of the characteristics that define the scope of your perceptual field.

The characteristics we want to examine are breadth, grain (or resolution), sensitivity, and discrimination. The perceptual lens described earlier is a metaphor — a way of conceptualizing perception as a process of filtering information and assembling the images that you experiences. This metaphor allows us to draw on analogies between optical lenses and perception more generally in describing these characteristics. We’ll look at each characteristic first in a visual or photographic context, then consider how it might operate in other perceptual dimensions as well, particularly in the kinesthetic perception of movement and body use.

Breadth

The breadth of your perceptual field has to do with how much you take in, with whether your field is broad or narrow. Let’s play with the breadth of your visual field. To experience a narrow field, curl your fingers into a tube and look around the room through that tube. You can see anything in the room that way, but you can only see a little piece at any one time. This is what a narrow field looks like. Now take your hand down and allow your visual focus to soften; consciously notice more of your peripheral vision. This is what a broader field looks like.

The optical field that your eyes are capable of presenting to you is quite broad. You can potentially see the sides of your nose, your eyebrows, and objects slightly behind the plane of your eyes on both sides all at the same time. Your optical field encompasses more than 180º. Experience this by holding both hands out in front of you and than gradually moving them toward your sides while you wiggle you fingers. You should be able to see the wiggling fingers with your hands slightly behind your head. (Wiggling your fingers is useful because your peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement than to stationary objects.)

Your functional visual field, on the other hand, is likely to be much narrower. You probably block out much of the optical field and functionally see only a relatively small portion in the center. You create a kind of “tunnel vision” which limits what you see. We’ll examine the reasons for that and the effects it has on your overall experience later, but for now we can illustrate it in the two figures below. The one on the left represents the full stream of information available, the one on the right reflects what is actually taken in by the narrowed awareness.

Perceptual narrowing isn’t just a visual phenomenon. It happens in all perceptual dimensions. Proprioceptive tunnel vision results in inefficient movement and body use. It lies at the root of many of the muscular-skeletal problems, such as back pain, that I deal with as a Feldenkrais practitioner. Restricting your awareness of how you use your back results in the strain and inefficient use that produces the pain. Intellectual tunnel vision — seeing issues too narrowly and ignoring what should be obvious pitfalls when policies and decisions are made — is a major contributor to many of social and environmental problems facing us today.

Grain

Grain or Resolution has to do with the level of detail the perceptual field provides. A fine-grained, high resolution image provides more detail that a corresponding coarser-grained image. This is illustrated visually in the following comparison.

In body awareness, a coarse-grained sense of self might involve experiencing and using your body as made up of a few distinct large pieces — two arms, two legs, a trunk, etc. — with only minimal awareness of the finer structure within and connecting those pieces. Many people live their lives this way, unfortunately. A finer grained self-awareness can produce easier, more efficient, and more fluid movement.

At intellectual levels, coarse-grained understanding produces stereotypes of all kinds, and the black and white arguments around more complex issues so common in public discourse.

Sensitivity

Sensitivity refers to the signal threshold necessary for something to register in your perceptual field. Visually, you can think of it as how much light you need, or how bright an object needs to be, in order to see it. Perceptual sensitivity is not constant but changes with time, even varying from one moment to the next. This variation may have multiple causes.

Your visual sensitivity varies with the amount of ambient light. Your eyes become less sensitive in bright light and more sensitive in low light. This is why it’s hard to see in a dark room when you first walk in from the sunlight, but it gets easier as your eyes adapt to the dark. Your visual sensitivity is different in different parts of your optical field. The cone receptors in your central field require a higher light level than do the rod receptors in your peripheral field, making your peripheral vision more sensitive than your central vision in low light. You may have had the experience at dusk of turning to look at something you noticed out of the corner of your eye, only to find that you don’t see anything when you look directly at it. You may have then simply decided that you made a mistake and there was really nothing there. But there may actually have been something there, and enough light for your rods to register it but not enough for your cones. Turning to look directly at something — an action which gives you more information in brighter light — can reduce your ability to perceive in a dimmer environment.

Your ability to perceive a signal will also depend on how much noise is present. You can hear and converse with a friend, for example, more easily in a quiet room than in a noisy crowded public place. And you can see the stars at night and not in the daytime because the backscattered light in the sky during the day creates a very high level of visual noise.

Discrimination

The last characteristic we want to look at is discrimination — the ability to distinguish between different possibilities in your perceptual field, and go give meaning to what you perceive. Your ability to discriminate depends on the earlier characteristics — your field needs to be sensitive enough, have enough grain, and be broad enough to let you distinguish between the possibilities in question — but discrimination requires something more. It requires that you possess a rich enough world knowledge to make the required discriminations.

Consider what you’re looking at right now. Your ability to attach meaning to what you see depends on a learned ability to discriminate the individual marks (letters) making up that material, to group them into meaningful clusters (words) and to interpret the sequencing of those clusters (into sentences and paragraphs) in a meaningful way. You can do this because you know how to read English, the language the material is presented in, and you understand the subject being discussed well enough to place what you read in a meaningful context. If any of those elements were missing your ability to draw meaning from what you are seeing would be seriously compromised.

Discrimination is a learned skill, so the discriminations you are capable of making depend on your past experience and what you have drawn from that experience. An aboriginal tracker can distinguish tracks that would be invisible to most of us. A trained musician can make musical distinctions most of us can’t hear. An experienced mechanic can diagnose problems with your car from listening to the engine when all you hear is noise. An experienced skier can read the snow and the slope. And so on.

The visual illusions we’ve looked at already — the faces/vase and the B/13 — depend on your ability to discriminate patterns within your perceptual field, as do other ambiguous figures such as the classic old woman/young woman and the rabbit/duck that Thomas Kuhn uses as an examplar of ambiguity in his groundbreaking study of The Structure of Scientific Revolution.

I explore some of these ideas further in my article entitled “Musings on Awareness.” In my next posting, I’ll look at the need for controlling attention, the interplay between awareness and attention, and some of the skills involved in managing both.