II. A Personal Model of Perception

Language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual, as is so often naively assumed, but is also a self-contained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help, but actually defines experience for us.”

Edward Sapir

In the theory proposed by Broad, the brain can be assumed to possess a kind of filtration system capable of screening out those details of the sensory landscape most useful for survival. But “survival” in a 21st century world requires fundamentally different information than in most of human history and consists of an incredible variety of skills and knowledge depending on one’s living environment. In industrialized societies, for instance, the skills and information necessary for survival are mostly social norms and protocol. Take eating as an example; finely tuned senses of hearing or smell which were once essential in a search for food are no longer required. Primal sensory experience has been replaced with the ability to understand product labels, scientific principles of nutrition or the social and societal mechanisms of shopping at a grocery store. “The kind of consciousness,” about which Huxley speaks, “which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet” is no longer immediate knowledge of a natural environment so much as a comprehension and understanding of the symbolic structure of our societies.

The information man requires today is most often what Ward Goodenough described as a society’s culture; “whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members.” This ‘cultural’ knowledge, the classical focus of anthropology, can thus be seen as the criteria for which mental filtration occurs. Kathryn Geurts, in her article Culture and the Senses discusses a similar idea to that of Broad and Huxley. Geurts refers to the principle of “sensory gating,” a term borrowed from neuro-science, as “a feedback system between the brain and sense receptors themselves that functions as a kind of damper or regulating mechanism on sensory activity.” Geurtz comes to a similar conclusion as myself when she suggests that “it is in sensory gating that a certain amount of cultural variation occurs.” In addition to the vast amount of “cultural variation” that exists across this planet, and the link between cultural survival and conscious perception discussed above, I find a brief discussion on the role of language in this equation provides valuable insight into mechanistic workings of this process.

Plenty of words have been strung together by anthropologists and other thinkers in attempts to explain the link between language and culture. Less, however, have been applied to the link between language and perception. In a notable exception from the 1940s, Alfred Korzybski wrote about how the structure of language profoundly effects our perceptions. According to Korzybski, what is often overlooked in our model of perception is an “interpretive” or “emotional” phase that takes place when we experience an event or sensation. This “interpretation” happens between, or alongside, an event’s physical registration on our senses - before sensation becomes part of our conscious awareness. According to Korzysbski this is due to the linguistic nature of consciousness. In order to see a tree, for instance, I must interpret the shapes, colors, smells and motion that my senses collect into a semantic concept. Basically, there seems to be a type of cognitive filtering going that is intimately related to the “sensory gating” spoken of by Geurts. Korzybski argues persuasively that our perceptions are informed by both physical stimuli and mental interpretation before ever becoming conscious and that our perceptions are often a matter of simplifying complex emotional reactions into words and language, with which we can then think. “Thus, all our fundamental deeper knowledge must be, and can never be anything but, hypothetical, as what we see, hear, feel, speak about, or infer, is never it, but only our human abstractions about ‘it.’ What kind of linguistic form our inferential knowledge is cast in thus becomes of utmost importance,” he writes. In other words, our language is a fundamental aspect of our perception because it is directly involved in the process by which raw sensory data eventually enters our consciousness.

Given the considerable emphasis made by anthropologists on the linguistic and symbolic elements of culture and Korzybski’s suggestion that they are a fundamental part of our sensory awareness, it seems plausible that “sensory gating” and “cultural variation” are at least interdependent. My guess is that culture provides the bulk of the criteria by which sensory information is conceptualized and made conscious. It follows that perception is not just culturally informed, but culturally limited as well. We are literally able to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ only what we have the requisite cultural language and concepts to understand. We are, in a sense, living in a culturally-shared interpretation of an infinite field of sensorial information.