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A visual blog today! For this to work, you need to stare at the white dot between the red and green squares and count to 60! Yes, you need to stare that dot for a whole minute. Then you can look at the other white dot and notice what you see.

Spoiler alert: even though the two lower images are exact mirror images of one another you should see a different colour cast on each side.

This is because your brain is showing you the information it thinks it should show you to make the most sense of current reality. It is interpreting reality as it sees fit.

If your brain sees the world as a mix of red and green as the dominant colours you pay attention to, then red and green will influence the way you ‘see’ everything else! The brain applies a kind of meaning to everything we perceive.

In other words, we don’t see the world as it is but rather as we see it. Or as Anaïs Nin put it far more eloquently, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” Or as Neuroscience would put it if there was a personification of Neuroscience, “We don’t see the world as it is but rather as our experience suggests it should be.”

Suppose your cultural upbringing had a strong emphasis on the black-and-white division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Your brain would do its utmost to interpret everything coming into it through the senses as either good or bad.

I’m going to recommend you have a day off. Have a day off from ‘bad’. In the perceptual exercise this would mean choosing either to have a red or green day, whichever best represent the colour of ‘good’ for you. For argument’s sake, let’s call it a, “Red Letter Day”! I promise you, if you had only red images at the top, looked at it for 60 seconds, and then looked at the dune scenes, you would not be able to tell them apart aside from the fact that they are mirror images.

Let’s choose today to only see the good in every situation by asking ourselves the question, “In which ways is this good?” And then let’s see what kind of day we have (or perceive to have!)

Lex

A Moodscope member.