Chapter 6: Visual Memory: Imagery, Dreams, and Mental Representation

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I want you to try something with me right now.

Wherever you are, whether you're commuting, sitting at a desk, or taking a walk, just stop for a second and look at the world around you.

Look at a wall or a window or even just the phone in your hand.

Give a good hard look.

Right.

It feels stable, doesn't it?

It feels continuous.

You perceive a high definition panoramic world that is just sitting there, solid and whole, waiting for you to observe it.

It feels like you're looking through a clear glass window.

Exactly.

It is the ultimate user interface.

I mean, the resolution feels infinite, the stability feels absolute.

There's a but.

There's a huge but.

Here's the thing.

If we actually strip away that interface and look at the hardware running it, specifically the biology of your eyes and the processing power of your brain, that stability is a complete illusion.

A fabrication.

And that is exactly where we are starting today.

We are taking a deep dive into chapter six of cognitive psychology.

The chapter is titled Visual Memory.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Visual memory sounds like we're just going to talk about how you remember a face you saw yesterday or where you left your keys.

Which is part of it, sure.

But this material goes so much deeper than that.

This isn't just about retrieving files from the past.

This is about how you construct your entire reality moment by moment right now.

We are moving beyond the basics we might have covered in previous deep dives.

We aren't talking about iconic memory, which is just that lightning fast split second flash that fades instantly.

Gone in a flash.

And we aren't talking about verbal memory where you look at a car and your brain just stores the word car.

That's too simple.

Way too simple.

We are discussing a third crucial system,

schematic visual memory.

This is the engine that allows you to synthesize visual information over time.

So the mission for this deep dive is to explain what the book calls the constructive act of vision.

A constructive act.

I love that phrasing.

We're going to find out why photographic memory is mostly a myth, how dreams and hallucinations actually work, and why your brain is definitely not a tape recorder.

The big takeaway from the source material, and if you take nothing else away, take this, is that perceiving is remembering.

That is a bold claim.

It is.

It sounds like a paradox.

Usually, we think of perception as live TV and memory as the DVR, but you're saying they're the same mechanism.

They are inextricably linked.

I mean, they have to be.

To understand why, we have to look at the biological reality of how you see.

You mentioned that the world looks stable, but your eyes.

Eyes are frantic.

Right.

Let's talk about the hardware.

Saccades.

Saccades.

Your eyes are not video cameras.

They do not pan smoothly across a room.

They make rapid, jerky movements called saccades several times every single second.

They dart around?

They dart from point A to point B, pause for a tiny fraction of a second, and then dart again.

So biologically speaking, my visual feed shouldn't look like a movie.

It should look like a shaky, disjointed mess of snapshots.

Exactly.

If you were to watch the raw feed from your retina on a monitor, it would look like a frantic series of unrelated photographs.

Wow.

Each snapshot or a fixation usually lasts only about 300 milliseconds.

That is barely enough time to register a simple shape.

And yet I don't see a strobe light effect.

I don't see a jumpy, handheld camera movie like the Blair Witch project.

I see a smooth, integrated room.

And that is the central mystery of this chapter.

How does the mind transform a messy succession of fleeting retinal images into the stable world you're looking at right now?

This brings us to the first major section of our discussion.

The constructive nature of vision.

We have this problem of integration.

We have all these little 300 millisecond snapshots.

How do we glue them together?

Early psychologists really wrestled with this.

Carl Lashley, back in the day, he called this a translation process.

He argued that we translate a succession of scans into a single impression of form.

A translation.

Yeah.

And this is really important.

This isn't just about vision.

This applies to how we touch things too.

Oh, that's a good comparison.

Think about reaching into your bag to find your keys in the dark.

Okay, let's walk through that.

You reach in.

You feel a jagged edge.

That's data point one.

Right.

Then you move your finger and feel a smooth curve.

Data point two.

Then the cold metal ring.

Data point three.

These are sequential events happening one after another.

But I don't experience them as a list of separate sensations.

My brain takes jagged, smooth, and cold and instantly builds a model of keys.

Exactly.

You see the keys with your fingers.

Your brain synthesizes the sequence into a simultaneous object.

You get the whole object at once in your mind.

Right.

And Lashley said vision works the same way.

We take the sequence of eye snapshots and translate them into a stable model.

Now historically, there was a theory about how this worked that sounds very logical to modern ears.

It's called the map theory or compensatory theory.

Right.

The idea was that the brain works like a map maker.

Imagine you're looking at a room.

You look left, take a snapshot.

Then you look right.

The theory says the brain calculates how much your eyes moved, subtracts that movement, and pastes the new snapshot onto a giant mental map next to the first one.

It's exactly how the panorama feature on a smartphone works.

That's the perfect analogy.

You take a slice, move the camera, the software matches the edges, and stitches it all together.

It makes perfect sense for a camera.

But the expert in our source material, Ulrich Neisser, argues that this simply doesn't work for the human brain.

We have to debunk the map theory.

Why?

If it works for my phone, why not for my brain?

Because a panorama assumes a static world.

If the brain were just compensating for eye movements mathematically, what happens when an object moves?

Or more importantly, what happens when you walk forward?

Well, if I walk forward, the image on my retina changes completely.

The window gets bigger, the perspective shifts.

The image expands.

If the brain just shifted the map left or right to compensate for eye movement, it wouldn't account for that expansion.

But here is the nuance.

Neisser points out that those changes on the retina, what we call proximal changes, are actually vital data.

They aren't errors to be fixed.

No, they are information to be used.

Think about motion parallax.

This is a fancy term for a simple experience.

When you're on a train looking out the window, the trees near the track zip by really fast.

Right, but the mountains in the distance barely move.

Exactly.

The speed difference tells you what is close and what is far.

It's how we perceive depth.

It is.

That shearing of the image on your retina tells you about depth and solidity.

If the brain just compensated for the movement to flatten everything onto a 2D mat, we'd lose that 3D perception.

We wouldn't see a world.

We'd see a flat painting.

So Neisser argues we have to discard the map theory.

Throw it out.

We aren't pasting snapshots onto a canvas.

So if we aren't pasting snapshots, what are we doing?

This leads us to the core concept of the chapter, figural synthesis.

Figural synthesis.

It's a beautiful term.

It means the perceiver, that's you, is actively constructing a developing schematic model of the object.

You aren't recording the object.

You are building a mental model of it.

A blueprint.

The text uses an analogy here regarding language that I think really clears this up.

Yes.

The sentence analogy is perfect.

Think about listening to a sentence.

If I say to you, the large dog chased the small cat,

what happens in your mind?

I picture a dog and a cat running.

Right.

But physically, I just hit your ears with a stream of phonemes, sounds,

serial noises.

Right.

Just a sequence of sounds.

You didn't memorize the sound waves.

Since you didn't record the audio, you constructed the meaning.

You built a scheme.

And if you asked me five minutes later what you said, I might say you talked about a dog chasing a cat.

I might not remember the exact words, but I remember the model.

Exactly.

Vision is the same.

You remember the object, not the specific sequence of retinal snapshots used to see it.

You are synthesizing the gist continuously.

This implies that what we see is heavily influenced by what we expect to see.

Our short -term memory of the last few seconds dictates how we interpret the next second.

Yes, completely.

And this brings us to a really cool experiment involving the classic wife, mother -in -law figure.

This is a staple of Psychology 101, but the deeper implications for memory are often missed.

For those who haven't seen it, it's an ambiguous line drawing.

It relies on shared lines.

Let's try to describe it.

It's a black and white sketch.

If you look at it one way, you see a young woman looking away from you.

You see her jawline, her ear, and a little fashionable necklace.

But if you shift your perspective, that same line that was the young woman's jawline becomes the big nose of an old woman looking down.

The young woman's ear becomes the old woman's eye.

And that necklace.

That necklace becomes the old woman's mouth.

It's a braid breaker.

You can flip back and forth.

Young old, young old.

But the study by Leeper in 1935 took this and used it to prove that memory drives perception.

Leeper divided people into groups.

He showed one group a version of the drawing that was clearly, unambiguously, the young woman.

He showed another group a version that was clearly the old woman.

So he's priming them.

This was the priming phase.

He planted a bias.

He planted a memory.

Yes, exactly.

Then, he showed both groups the ambiguous composite image.

The one that could be either.

And what happened?

They were locked in.

The people who saw the young woman first could only see the young woman in the ambiguous drawing.

They literally couldn't see the old lady.

Wow.

Their past experience, their schematic memory, was organizing the current visual input.

Later on,

researchers named Epstein and Rock took this even further.

They showed a sequence of images.

Young, old, young, old, young.

Right.

A pattern.

And then the ambiguous one.

And people saw the old woman.

Why?

Because that was the next logical step in the sequence.

The pattern required an old image next.

Their brain predicted it.

This is wild.

It proves that visual perception isn't just photons hitting the retina.

It's a constructive act influenced by what you just saw.

Your memory is organizing your current visual input.

You are predicting the world as much as you are seeing it.

So it leads to a very interesting debate in the history of the field.

We know we glue these snapshots together.

But how?

Is it just habit?

Or is it something more creative?

And this is the section two showdown.

Donald Hebb versus the cognitive psychologists.

Hebb.

Big name.

Donald Hebb, writing in 1949, was a giant.

He proposed a theory called the phase sequence.

It was based entirely on habit and repetition.

So he thought we were basically robots of habit.

In a way.

He argued that the only reason you see a stable coffee cup is because you have looked at coffee cups thousands of times.

Your neurons have learned that curve A is usually followed by handle B.

Ah, neurons that fire together, wire together.

That's Hebb.

You see the whole, because you've seen it before.

So familiarity breeds stability.

I see the cup because I know what a cup looks like.

Precisely.

But there is a massive problem with that theory.

A gaping hole.

The novelty argument.

Right.

You and I can walk into a modern art museum.

We can look at a sculpture we have never seen in our lives.

Some twisted abstract metal shape.

Right.

We have no habit for the shape, no neural pathway.

And yet.

And yet I see it clearly.

I see it as a solid unified object.

I don't see a mess of disconnected parts.

Exactly.

If perception were just about replaying old habits, we would be blind to anything truly new.

But we aren't.

We can synthesize novel objects instantly.

So the mechanism has to be more active, more general.

Yes.

Not just a playback of specific memories.

And to prove that synthesis is active, that we are building the object in real time, the source material brings up apparent motion.

This is basically how movies work.

Right.

But let's look at it in a lab setting.

If I flash a light on the left side of a screen, and then 300 milliseconds later flash a light on the right side, you don't see two lights.

No, you see one light moving from left to right.

My brain fills in the gap.

It invents motion where there is none.

But here is where it gets really interesting.

This is the smoking gun for figural synthesis.

The Necker cube experiment by Kohlers.

I love this one.

Okay, picture the Necker cube.

It's a simple line drawing of a transparent box.

Yeah.

Because it's transparent, it's ambiguous.

Sometimes the front face looks like it's in the front, but if you stare at it, it flips.

And the back face looks like it's in the front.

It's bisteftable.

It flips perspective.

Now Kohlers put this cube into apparent motion.

So he flashed it here, then there.

So it looked like it was flying across the screen, like a tumbling block.

And he found something incredible.

He found that sometimes the cube would flip its perspective in mid -flight.

Wait, hold on.

In mid -flight,

but there's nothing there.

The light is off between the two points.

The cube doesn't exist in the space between the flashes.

That is exactly the point.

The brain is constructing the motion path.

And while it is constructing this imaginary path for an imaginary object, it decides to flip the perspective of the object it is currently inventing.

That is mind -blowing.

It has to be a construction.

It proves the mind is building the object, not just inferring it from habit.

If it were just habit, we wouldn't be manipulating an invisible object in empty space.

Precisely.

It shows that figural synthesis is a creative, active process.

We are constantly animating our reality.

We are the CGI artists of our own experience.

So we've established that we are constantly generating images to perceive the world.

This naturally leads us to the topic of visual imagery.

Seeing with the mind's eye.

Right.

But before we get to the cool stuff like photographic memory, we have to clear the decks.

We need to distinguish imagery from afterimages.

Yes.

This is a crucial distinction that often confuses people.

If you stare at a bright light bulb for 10 seconds, don't actually do this, please.

But if you did and then looked at a white wall, you'd see a dark spot.

That's an afterimage.

Right.

And the text calls these the dregs of the system.

It's a harsh but accurate description.

Dregs.

I like that.

Afterimages are retinally fixed.

If you move your eyes to the left, the spot moves to the left.

It's basically just tired sensors on your retina -bleached photoreceptors.

It's hardware fatigue.

That's all it is.

It's not memory.

It's like a burn -in on an old plasma TV.

Exactly.

But real visual, visual imagery works differently.

It stays put in space.

Okay.

Let's test that.

Right.

If I ask you to imagine a cat sitting on your desk right now.

Okay.

Visualize the cat.

Got it.

Now, move your eyes to look at the door.

Does the cat float over to the door?

No.

The imaginary cat stays on the desk.

You have to move your eyes back to the desk to see it again.

And that implies that true imagery uses the same constructive machinery as perception.

You scan your mental images just like you scan a real room.

Which brings us to the stuff of legends.

Photographic memory.

Or, to use the sophisticated terminology from the chapter, idetic imagery.

I think we all secretly wish we had this.

The ability to just snap a picture of a textbook page and read it during the exam.

It is one of the most misunderstood concepts in psychology.

We often think of photographic memory as someone taking a high -res JPEG of a scene and storing it in a folder in their brain.

Like it's static.

We think it's static.

But the research paints a very different picture.

The Haber and Haber study from 1964 is the gold standard here.

They went looking for these ideticers and they found something surprising in how they behaved.

Okay.

What was the setup?

They tested elementary school children in New Haven.

They showed them complex pictures like a drawing of Native Americans fishing in a canoe for about 30 seconds.

Then they took the picture away and placed a blank easel in front of the child.

And they asked the kids what they saw.

Right.

Now, most people, you or I, would just say, I remember seeing three feathers.

We report facts from verbal memory.

But a small percentage of these kids, about 8%, acted very differently.

They stared at the blank easel.

And here's the key behavior.

Their eyes were moving.

They were scanning the blank easel.

As if the picture were still there.

They would look at a specific spot on the empty board and say, oh, there are four feathers on that Indian or the fish is green.

That is incredible.

So they were projecting the image back out onto the world.

Yes.

But the eye movements are the tell.

If it were just a static photograph stamped on their retina like an after image, they wouldn't need to scan it.

Right.

It would just be there.

The fact that they were scanning proves that even for these gifted kids, the image is being constructed moment by moment.

It requires active participation.

It's not a file retrieval.

It's a live performance.

So even photographic memory isn't truly photographic.

It's just super powered reconstruction.

That's it.

But you mentioned these are kids.

Why is it so rare in adults?

Do we grow out of it?

That's the million dollar question.

There's a fascinating cross -cultural study by Doob mentioned in the text.

He looked at adults in rural Nigeria.

He found that among illiterate rural adults, eidetic imagery was actually quite common.

But in the urban educated population of the same tribe, it was almost absent.

Whoa.

So is the implication that learning to read might kill our ability to hallucinate pictures?

It's a speculation, but a strong one.

Western education and literacy force us into abstract verbal processing.

We stop relying on the visual presence of things.

We trade the raw image for the concept.

We trade the picture for the word.

That is a heavy trade -off.

We gain efficiency, but we lose that visceral connection to the visual world.

But let's talk about the hallucinations we all have, regardless of literacy.

Dreams.

The ultimate constructive act.

The source material makes an important distinction here.

We often think dreams are real because they are high definition.

Right.

We think they're like 4K movies.

But actually, if you really remember them, dreams are often blurry or vague.

Right.

We believe them not because the graphics are good, but because we suspend reality testing.

Explain that.

In a waking state, if you see a pink elephant, you check, is it really there?

Do others see it?

In a dream, you just accept the pink elephant.

But mechanically, dreaming looks a lot like seeing.

And just like with the idetic kids, there's a physical connection to how we see dreams.

REM sleep.

Rapid eye movement.

This was a breakthrough finding by Rofforg.

They tracked the eye movements of sleepers and then woke them up to ask what they were dreaming.

To see if they matched up.

They wanted to see if the eye movements matched the action in the dream.

And did they?

They did, right.

Perfectly.

The classic example in the text is the stairs.

A dreamer reported climbing a set of five stairs.

The recording of his eyes showed five distinct upward movements.

That is so cool.

He was literally scanning the dream stairs just as he would scan real stairs.

It implies that the mind's eye isn't a metaphor.

It uses the real eyes.

The brain is generating a model and the eyes are exploring it.

So whether I'm looking at this microphone, imagining a cat, or dreaming about stairs,

my brain is doing the exact same mechanical work.

That is the core argument.

It is all the same constructive machinery.

Imagery isn't opening an old file.

It is the same process as perception.

Just without the input from the outside world.

Now there is also this twilight zone called the hypnagogic state.

That time right before you fall asleep.

Oh yeah.

I've had this.

Where you close your eyes and suddenly a face turns into a landscape.

Or you see a geometric pattern.

Exactly.

It's often primary process thinking.

Very symbolic.

Very fluid.

Unlike dreams, you usually know you're hallucinating.

It's a strange feeling.

The text mentions that sensory deprivation can trigger this too.

There's something called the prisoner's cinema.

When the brain is starved of visual input like being in a pitch black cell, it starts generating its own.

It hates a vacuum.

Which begs the question, what is the point?

Why do we have this ability to generate images?

Does it help us remember things better?

Intuition says yes.

You'd think a visualizer, someone who thinks in pictures, would pass a memory test better than someone who can't visualize.

But that's not what the research shows.

But the research, particularly by Bartlett, says generally no.

Really?

Having a picture in your head doesn't help.

It helps with confidence, but not necessarily accuracy.

Visualizers are often very sure of what they remember, but they tend to import details that weren't there.

Oh, interesting.

They construct a good picture, not necessarily a true one.

They might add a hat to a man who wasn't wearing one because it fits the picture.

So the image is what the text calls a cognitive luxury.

That's the term.

Think about the Pythagorean theorem.

A dollars plus B2 plus B2 at C22.

You might imagine a triangle when you think of it, but the picture of the triangle doesn't give you the formula.

The formula is conceptual.

The image is just decoration.

But decoration can have meaning.

The text brings up Silberer and symbolic transformation.

This is where abstract ideas turn into concrete pictures.

This is one of my favorite anecdotes in the chapter.

It perfectly illustrates how the brain translates thoughts into images.

Silberer was a researcher who was lying on a couch trying to compare the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer.

That sounds like a recipe for a nap.

It was.

It was a heavy abstract mental struggle.

He couldn't quite grasp the connection between the two philosophers.

He was drifting off to sleep.

And then?

Suddenly, the abstract struggle vanished.

In his mind, he saw a morose secretary leaning over a desk, refusing to give him information.

That is brilliant.

His brain took the abstract feeling of, I can't get this information, and turned it into a visual metaphor of a grumpy secretary.

It's a perfect example of how the mind seeks concrete forms for abstract states.

We see this in dreams all the time.

A feeling of being overwhelmed becomes a tidal wave.

A feeling of vulnerability becomes being naked in public.

Speaking of influencing dreams, let's talk about Inception.

Can we plant dreams?

Scientists have tried.

There's the Witkin study where they showed people an emotional film before sleep.

A graphic childbirth video, actually.

Intense way to fall asleep.

Very.

And elements of that film did bleed into their hypnagogic fantasies.

One subject saw an apple with a worm in it, a clear symbol of the biological unease they were feeling.

But what about subliminal stuff?

There's this idea called the Putzel Phenomenon.

The idea that if I flash a picture at you so fast you don't consciously see it, it will pop up in your dreams later.

This is a controversial one.

Putzel claimed it happens.

But Neisser, our author, is extremely skeptical.

And he uses a statistical argument that I love because it's so simple.

Hit me with the math.

Okay, remember we talked about fixations.

Your eyes make about 100 ,000 fixations a day.

That's 100 ,000 snapshots of the world entering your brain every single day.

That is a lot of data.

A ton of data.

So if you dream about a specific image that was slashed at you, Putzel says, aha, it's because of the subliminal flash.

Right.

But statistically,

you have 100 ,000 other images in your head from that day.

Finding a random detail in a dream that matches one of those snapshots is inevitable just by chance.

So it's confirmation bias.

You look for the match and you find it.

Exactly.

Plus, in these experiments, the subjects knew they were being tested.

They were staring intently at the screen.

Even if the flash was fast, they were hyper -focused on it.

Neisser thinks the Putzel phenomenon is shaky at best.

So probably no subliminal dream control.

Probably not.

Let's move to the edgier side of visual memory.

Altered states.

Drugs and madness.

The text discusses hallucinogens like LSD and mescaline.

What's fascinating is that there is a universal structure to the early stages of a trip.

They call them form constants.

These are geometric patterns, right?

Cobwebs, spirals, tunnels.

Yes.

Almost everyone sees them initially.

And the theory is that these aren't memories or spiritual visions yet.

They are likely just the amplification of the internal physiological structures of the eye itself.

Wait, so you're seeing your own eyeball.

In a way.

You're seeing your own capillaries and neural architecture because the gain on the visual system is turned up too high.

It grounds the hallucination in biology pretty hard.

But then you have all this Huxley.

He wrote The Doors of Perception.

You expect him to have these grand cinematic visions.

But he didn't.

And this was a surprise to me reading this chapter.

Huxley was a poor visualizer in daily life.

He confessed that he couldn't summon up a clear face in his mind if he tried.

So what happened when he took mescaline?

He saw beautiful colors and jewels, but he didn't see landscapes or people.

He didn't enter a new world.

So the drug amplifies what you already have.

It doesn't give you a new superpower.

Exactly.

If your visual synthesis machine is low -res, the drug just gives you bright low -res abstract art.

It can't create a faculty you don't possess.

Now, how does this compare to schizophrenia?

People often confuse the two tripping in psychosis.

There is a major distinction.

Schizophrenic hallucinations are primarily auditory.

They hear voices.

They don't see things.

They can, but it's much rarer.

And when they do see things, it's usually meaningful to their delusion, like seeing the devil or a specific person.

So it's not the geometric alien stuff?

No, not the cobwebs and spirals that you get from drugs.

Drug visions feel unreal and alien to the user.

Schizophrenic visions feel personally significant.

That brings us to one last altered state.

Hypnosis.

We talked about the constructive act.

Hypnosis seems like the ultimate test of this.

Specifically, trance logic.

This is the ability to tolerate logical inconsistencies.

Okay.

If I tell a hypnotized subject, your friend Bob is sitting in that empty chair.

They will construct an image of Bob.

They might even talk to him.

Okay.

But here's the test.

What if the real Bob walks into the room?

A person who is faking hypnosis will panic.

They will say they don't see the real Bob to keep up the act.

They know there can only be one Bob.

But a genuinely hypnotized person.

They will look at the empty chair and see Bob.

They will look at the door and see the real Bob.

And they will just accept it.

They might say, oh, there are two Bobs now.

That is wild.

It shows how the internal construction can completely override physical reality without the brain throwing a syntax error.

It highlights that seeing is a decision the brain makes.

It's not just a passive reception of light.

This leads us to the grand finale.

The permanent record myth.

There is this popular idea.

I think we've all heard it.

That our brain records everything we've ever seen.

Like a 247 CCTV camera.

And we just can't access the files.

This myth was largely popularized by Wilder Penfield's experiments in the mid -20th century.

He was a neurosurgeon performing brain surgery on conscious patients for epilepsy.

Right.

He would stimulate parts of the temporal lobe with an electrode.

And the patients would suddenly report flashbacks.

They would say things like, I hear a mother calling her child.

Or I hear a specific song.

Penfield concluded that he had hit the play button on a permanent tape recorder of memory.

He thought everything was stored there, perfectly preserved.

It's a very romantic idea.

That nothing is ever lost.

It is.

But nicer and other cognitive psychologists tear this apart.

First off, the reports were often generic.

A mother calling.

Not my mother calling me on Tuesday, August 4th, 1952.

Exactly.

It's more like a stock photo than a personal snapshot.

It's generic content.

Secondly, vividness does not equal accuracy.

Just because it feels real doesn't mean it is.

Just because it felt real like a dream doesn't mean it was a memory.

And crucially, based on everything we've discussed today, the text argues these were constructions.

Yes.

The electrical stimulation didn't hit play.

It triggered a synthesis process.

The brain took that spark of electricity and built a scene out of available parts.

It wasn't playing back a tape.

It was improvising a scene.

So the permanent record is a myth.

It is.

Memory is always a reconstruction in the present moment.

We don't have a video archive.

We have our creative studio.

So let's bring it all home.

What is the big picture here?

The big picture is that vision is active.

We don't passively receive the world.

We stitch it together from shaky snapshots.

We build models.

We fill in gaps.

And that machinery is always running.

Always.

Whether we are looking at a coffee cup, remembering a childhood home, or dreaming about flying, we are using the same figural synthesis machinery.

We are not video recorders.

We are artists.

Every moment of our waking life is a creative act.

And that means that the world you see is, in a very real sense, a world you are constantly building.

Which leaves us with a final thought to chew on.

If our perception of the real world is a construction, and our memories are just reconstructions made in the present,

how much of your daily reality is actually out there and how much is just in here?

It's a question that keeps cognitive psychologists and philosophers up at night.

Thanks for diving deep with us.

Always a pleasure.

This has been the Last Minute Lecture Team, signing off.

See you in the next Deep Dive.