Somewhere in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific Ocean, 1500 metres down lives a fascinating creature. When imagining mysterious critters of the deep, one envisions bizarre beasts seen in textbooks with strange appendages like the anglerfish, or the luminescent sea angel. But I humbly present to you something far more plain, yet equally as captivating: the Mantis Shrimp.
Humans have three photoreceptors: red, green, and blue. Some birds have four. But Mantis shrimp have 12-16 photoreceptors, with the ability to see UV, visible and polarised light. They are the only known animals to detect circular polarised light. Mantis shrimp are able to perceive depth with only one eye, unlike human binomial vision, and can move each eye independently.
Imagine for a second what kind of color and richness you would experience with these eyes? How would you perceive the world around you and in what way would that change your thoughts, or even feelings?
The brain is a complicated receiver that is constantly parsing and deconstructing jumbles of signals from our rudimentary sensory system. Our eyes project images upside and backwards, adding an additional layer of processing for the brain to rectify. We don’t actually feel certain sensations like wetness but require our central processor to fill in those holes with accumulated knowledge and understanding.
Spicy foods?
We don’t have taste receptors for them, rather we sense the heat from chemicals like capsaicin and yet again… fill in the holes.
The blind spot where your optic nerve hits the retina?
You guessed it, a hole.
So much of our lived experience is the brain patching up and embellishing its understanding of our crude senses and perceptions based on accumulated knowledge. Entire memories can be altered in response to feelings or the power of suggestion. We sense colors, tastes, and smells differently from others. We view the faces of our loved ones through a completely different lens than a stranger would.
While the raw data exists out there in the form of wavelengths, textures, and soundwaves, the way that we interpret this information is largely a product of our internal processing system. Emotions are, in a sense, not real but they have the power to influence what real is.
When I say real, I mean that they are not objective truths. It is true that a stimulus can be interpreted in a way that elicits a response – but the response is subject to conditioning. Olives, fresh cut grass, aquamarine, nails on chalkboard, why is it that some of us feel repulsed by these?
A large part of the answer is, of course, genetics. But I argue that much of our responses are shaped over a lifetime of conditioning. There are layers of emotions and memories tied up in the way that we feel about certain things. Fresh baked bread transports me to halcyon days as a child, helping my mom in the kitchen. I wonder sometimes if that smell will one day cause me pain and grief. Nothing will have changed about the structure of the chemicals that elicit the aroma, but the way that I feel about them might.
Can we actively change our so-called innate responses to certain stimuli? Can we train our brains to fill in those holes in a way that completely changes our reactions?
I have good and bad news for you.
If you hate cilantro, you’re probably going to continue to hate cilantro for the rest of your life. It’s genetic and one of those things we have no control over. Some of the time, we really just are the way we are. In many other situations, our visceral responses have been cultivated. How does it feel to be freshly single on Valentine’s Day? Nothing about this day has changed but your relationship status. How does the same piece of chocolate taste before and after a diet? The answer lies in perception.
The good news is that our brains are incredibly plastic, and continue to develop and change as we age. We can rewire our software to slowly alter the way it fills in missing information. How many times have you heard or even said to yourself “that’s just the way I am?” I invite you to push back on that thought and to instead recognize that being is subjective. Is it truly just the way you are? Or have you invested years of your life into an identity and decided that change is too hard?
Until our vision evolves to the level of the Mantis Shrimp, we continue to add meaning to sensory data, filling in gaps with our own stories. How you feel in a moment or how you perceive the world around you is largely subjective. The way that you fill in the holes is dependent on a lifetime of conditioning.
But it’s never too late to unlearn.
