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.

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So far we’ve been looking primarily at the perception of information impinging on you from the outside world. But human experience involves more than that. You are a physical being, with a physical body that moves through space and interacts with the world around you, physically and in other ways. You assess situations, make choices, and carry out actions. Your experience encompasses all of those things — your body, your movement, and your interaction with the world. Any description of how you compose your experience must take those dimensions into account as well.

I’ll use the term somatic to refer to those aspects of experience that relate to physicality. The term comes from the Greek word soma, meaning body, in contrast to psyche, meaning mind. Its dictionary meaning is “relating to the body as distinct from the mind,” though a shading of its meaning in the direction of “relating to the experience of living in a body” has been coming into common use in recent years. That latter meaning is more in keeping with my use of the term.

Our previous approximation for the Perceptual Process model focused on information coming in from the outside. Let’s now add the somatic information flows within the body and from the body back to the outside world. In the schematic below, these flows are labeled motor stream, proprioceptive stream, and external effects.

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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.

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I’ve described composing experience as a process of selecting and assembling bits of information from an ongoing perceptual stream into the multidimensional images we use to experience the world around us. The familiar faces/vase figure provided one example of how using information from different parts of the perceptual stream can produce different experiences, while the various ways that different people compose their perceptions of their own bodies provided others. But composing experience involves more than simply the selecting a portion of the perceptual stream. It also involves interpreting the information selected giving it meaning within the context of the experience. The same information may be interpreted very differently depending on the surrounding context.

A simple example of the importance of context is shown here. The central character can be read as the letter B or the number 13, depending on whether you read across or down. At first glance, this looks similar to the faces/vase — both figures are ambiguous and will support each of two interpretations. On closer examination, though, the mechanism here is quite different from the mechanism operating with the faces and vase. The switch between the B and the 13 doesn’t come from assembling the figure from different portions of the perceptual stream. Both the B and the 13 are constructed from the same raw data. The difference lies in the surrounding context. When you read horizontally, you interpret that data in the context of the A and C and see a B. When you read vertically, the same information (now in the context of the 12 and 14) becomes a 13. The perceptual principle here is that

your experience of a situation (the B/13, in this case) depends
on the context within which you interpret that situation.

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When I teach Composing Experience in workshops, I often begin with a direct experience illustrating how strongly your unconscious choices can affect your experience — even in situations that seem clear and straightforward. This is one of those experiences.

The situation is one in which you put one hand on your forehead and hold it there, while a partner grasps your wrist and slowly applies force to pull it away. Your resulting experience will depend on how you organize your perception of that situation, as the following video shows. Don’t just passively watch, but pause between the variations and play with them. If you watch with a friend, try each variation along with the video. If you watch alone, see how much of each experience you can recreate in your imagination as I describe them.

The exploration should not be approached as a contest between you and your partner, where he wins if he pulls your hand away and you win if he doesn’t. Rather, your partner should endeavor to provide the same stimulus each time — the same kind and amount of pull on your arm — so you can see how your perceptual choices affect the resulting experience for both of you.

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