HOW WE PERCEIVE.

HOW WE PERCEIVE. The experiment I posted on yesterday involving photographs of bicycles provides support for what Atul Guwande calls in this New Yorker article “the account of perception that’s starting to emerge.” He calls it the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception. People tend to think that we perceive things in the world directly, but the new theory says that seeing is drawing inferences, as the bicycle-photograph experiment illustrates. Guwande cites a neuropsychologist who estimates that visual perception is roughly 90% memory and 10% sensory nerve signals.