By Which Defined?

At a certain level, our brains are equal part sensory receptor and equal part filter.  At a given moment, we are being inundated with sensory inputs.  We may, for example, hear the sound of a television, or a song on the radio, while at the same time picking up the whistle of wind at the nearest open window and the voices of people around us.  Concurrently, we might find ourselves rubbing at a persistent pain in our back and feeling a light breeze silking across our cheeks.   The breeze may carry the delicate fragrance of freshly-mown grass mixed with light smoke from a nearby barbeque.  Finally, our eyes might be continually adjusting to light that is rapidly modulating in intensity as clouds roll across the face of the sun.

These are the inputs we capture and process.

But what about the other inputs?

What about the light reaching us at wavelengths, such as infrared, that we cannot perceive?  What about the motions of an insect’s wing beats that occur so rapidly we see nothing as the insect streaks by?   What about the sounds beyond the range of our hearing—the sounds that send our cats scampering to hide but leave us calmly sipping our wine in what we consider perfect silence?  What is the dog sniffing at when he first puts his nose to our shoe when we first greet?

Simply put, we cannot process all of the sensory inputs provided to us at a given instant or even those spread over a long period of time.  Our brain and sensory receptors must, by design, filter out the sensory feeds we do not critically require.  We must glean through the entire heap to gather only that which matters to us—this, to avoid overload and confusion.

Truly, we see only part of the second to second and day to day world in which we reside.  We do not perceive some of the gears that are turning directly in front of us.

Consider our vision as compared to the humble butterfly.  Where we see a plain red flower of a single color, a butterfly may (with a wider range of the light spectrum available to them) see multiple colors and a striking pattern that is imperceptible to us on the petals.

Compare our sense of smell to that of a bloodhound.  A bloodhound is capable of following the scantest trail of scent where a person did no more that walk away.

All of this leads me to one simple question: are we defined by the inputs we perceive or are we more aptly defined by all that we exclude?  If that sounds silly, stop and think about how the social inputs we exclude define us.

--Mitchell Hegman