Perception Box: A Detailed Explanation
Perception Box is a powerful metaphor, created by Elizabeth R. Koch, that describes how a person’s perception is skewed by various factors such as beliefs, biases, and narratives. It relates to the architecture of our mind that all humans, and indeed, all conscious creatures, are constrained by. We each live in our own Perception Box, a box whose walls are invisible and unbreakable, as we can only experience what our neural circuitry permits our mind to experience. These walls, or constraints, become the filter through which we interpret everyone and everything. This ineluctable fact is true of every sentient being, each adapted to their niche, and so, as a consequence, each with their own, distinct, Perception Box. We like to use this term as it encompasses the entire construct of our mind that we are used to calling ‘reality’. Explanations that reduce our experiences to constituent parts may hinder researchers from finding the most useful interventions. We believe that it is critical to understand the neural mechanisms underlying the Perception Box construct, but the primary focus of our research funding is on subjective experience, which we believe to be the combined product of these mechanisms. The extent to which our perceptions are skewed can be described in terms of expansion or contraction. When our Perception Box is contracted, our experience is highly constrained by negative factors. When expanded, we gain additional freedom to have more open, curious, and healthy experiences.
Everyone, even the most enlightened person, is a prisoner within their own conscious experience of perceived reality.
How we view and interpret the world and its inhabitants is dictated by our genes and the physical and social environment in which we were raised (“nature” and “nurture”). We absorb cultural norms, that is, spoken and unspoken rules as well as conscious and unconscious assumptions and biases about appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, situations, and goals that we use to construct meaning and the narrative of our life. These priors, to adopt the language of Bayesian reasoning, are shaped by personal experiences, both beneficial and traumatic, that can reach all the way back to early childhood events and constrain the way we respond to social situations, to individuals based on their in-group vs. out-group affiliation, looks, skin color, actions, language, and other cultural signifiers.
Collectively, these constraints, most of which are not consciously accessible, determine our view of reality, in particular social reality. This limitation is well expressed by the powerful metaphor, created by Elizabeth R. Koch, of Perception Box.
Collectively, these constraints, most of which are not consciously accessible, determine our view of reality, in particular social reality. This limitation is well expressed by the powerful metaphor, created by Elizabeth R. Koch, of Perception Box. When its walls are contracted, our Perception Box becomes the source of much suffering, rumination, insensitivity to the experiences of others, and misinterpretation of one’s predicament and that of other sentient beings. We feel as though we are victims without agency, on the hunt for someone to blame. When its walls expand, we are open to the universe and to people.
When our Perception Box walls are contracted... we feel as though we are victims without agency, on the hunt for someone to blame. When its walls expand, we are open to the universe and to people.
The Perception Box’s borders and contents are a consequence of how the physical substrate of consciousness in our brain is organized—the neurons that constitute it and how they are wired.
The Perception Box’s borders and contents are a consequence of how the physical substrate of consciousness in our brain is organized— the neurons that constitute it and how they are wired. This wiring comes about through evolution (phylogeny) and development (ontogeny). Evolution, instantiated in our common genetic heritage, makes us homo sapiens. The associated genetic blueprint provides for powerful supervised and unsupervised learning capabilities, allowing babies and children to adapt to a vast diversity of different physical, social, and linguistic environments and mature into functional adults (e.g., synaptic sprouting in the first year or two of our lives, following by pruning and Hebbian learning via synaptic plasticity). Learning continues throughout life all the way into healthy aging. This neural and mental flexibility enables us to survive and compete in the complex, highly dynamic technological and cultural environments that constitute the modern world.
Our conscious experience of the world, our body, and our self—with its attendant emotions and feelings—are the only reality we know. Our learnt biases, without which we cannot survive, together with our senses and our reasoning abilities, constrain how we view the world. This ineluctable fact is true of every sentient being. We take this reality for granted and implicitly assume that it is the same for everyone. Of course, at least some of us understand at an abstract level that we are biased, that what we perceive and what is can be quite divergent. But such high-level cognitive insights rarely lead to concrete changes. The underlying biases and habits are too deeply ingrained. Political campaigns, social unrest, and viral social media posts (remember “the dress”, a Facebook photograph seen by millions of viewers in 2015; to many it appeared black and blue while, to others, it was just as obviously white and gold) remind us that others look at the same situation and come to very different conclusions, impacting our emotional well-being in major ways.
When we believe our Perception Box stories, we belittle ourselves and others; we adopt Manichaean thinking; we ruminate endlessly about perceived past insults and slights to our ego, catastrophize about future events, minimize our own accomplishments, discount our own needs, and take our emotions to be the ultimate arbiter of reality. These biases prevent us from seeing what we don’t want to see or don’t expect to see. We mentally filter events without knowing this, rapidly jump to conclusions based on limited information and label people and events based on first impressions.
These dysfunctional, ruminating, ego-obsessed states are associated with a reduction of consciousness, with contracted Perception Box states in which subjects feel frustrated, anxious, fearful, and worried, while an expansion of Perception Box states is experienced as open to the world, less-ego driven, joyful, connected, and kind (note that this is independent of arousal levels).
These highly ingrained biases, beliefs, and habits can be modified by various tools and interventions— the brain is plastic after all. The traditional approach is to be open to different perspectives, emphasized through education in schools, therapy, and storytelling via movies, books, and other means. These can be effective tools, yet their benefit takes time and is incremental.
An alternative are transformative experiences: those that demonstrate vividly how the very same inputs from the environment can appear quite differently to me, the experiencing subject, when my mind is changed. Then I can have a true epiphany: the world is constructed by my own mind—in fact, it is constricted by it. I can truly realize the confines of my own Perception Box and only then—when the walls of the Perception Box become apparent—can the work begin to expand them. Only then can we literally begin to see the same old world with a new mind.
Remember, the ultimate aim of all of this research is to help improve the well-being and the physical and mental health of as many people everywhere as possible.
Illustrative Areas of Interest
There are many ways in which such transformative experiences that expand the walls of our Perception Box can be achieved. Most involve a reduction in the sense of self and self-consciousness, undergoing ego reduction, relaxation, or even dissolution.
ONE: As taught by many spiritual traditions, a disengagement with the tangles of selfhood is often a prerequisite for expanding consciousness, enabling compassion, and promoting well-being. This is at the heart of traditional meditation and mindfulness training techniques. We are eager to explore novel tools and methods to reduce the high barriers for meditation to succeed.
TWO: Responsible use of psychedelics (such as psilocybin or ayahuasca) and transcendelics (such as 5-MeO-DMT) can help us achieve both a reduction or dissolution of the self and a palpable realization that normal perception is a construction. We surmise that the long-lasting therapeutic effects of psychedelics on many psychiatric disorders that are being investigated in clinical trials right now may be, in fact, the consequence of the conscious transformative experience they trigger. Can this be demonstrated experimentally? Furthermore, might these beneficial effects also extend to a much broader neurotypical public (with proper screening, set and setting and help to integrate the experiences in their lives)? Can the neuronal footprints of these transformative experience be tracked in the brain?
THREE: In implicit learning certain stimuli (say, certain faces) are statistically paired with other rewarded stimuli, without subjects noticing the pairing. In such cases, the unrewarded stimuli can inherit the reward from the paired ones. In other words, desirable plastic changes can be triggered in our brain without consciously knowing that the walls of our Perception Box have expanded. After such implicit learning, for example, people that were previously perceived as unfamiliar and mildly threatening could be perceived as familiar and well-meaning. If successful, this approach could also lead to an epiphany: something has only changed in my mind—not in the world—and yet the world looks quite different from before.
Ego reduction can also be achieved by pranayama breathwork, by aerobic activities that induce a flow state, and by other means yet to be discovered. Different interventions, such as sensory feedback using different neural signals and modalities, transcranial current stimulation and so on, seek to achieve this goal in a way that is safe, reproducible, practical, and universally applicable so that its impact can scale to benefit the largest number of people.
These are just a few of the many possible ideas that could be empirically pursued, provided that the proposed research is rigorous and has specific, measurable, and realistic aims.