How do you know you exist? Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, explains.
He challenges “naive realism,” showing how reality is filtered through our senses and shaped by culture, bias, and brain wiring. Using examples like the viral 2015 ‘Gold Dress’ phenomenon and his own experience with meditation, Koch explains how expanding our Perception Box fosters empathy, openness, and a deeper sense of belonging in the world.
We created this video for The Science of Perception Box, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
CHRISTOF KOCH: How do you know you exist? Seeing, hearing, loving, fearing, dreading, dreaming, imagining. Those are all different types of conscious experience.
When I see something or hear something, my supposition is, of course, that this is reality, but it's not reality. All we see and all we hear and all we touch, etc, is always mediated by our senses and through our brains. That is very much different in each individual.
We live inside this Perception Box, all of us. And so when something changes in a transformative experience and you expand the walls of your Perception Box, you interpret it differently from before. So you sort of become more curious, you believe you have agency, you believe you can make difference in the world. And that is a much more positive attitude, a much more adaptive, beneficial attitude to people. Where they're more content and more at ease and more comfortable with themselves and more home in the world.
Hi, I'm Christof Koch. I'm a brain scientist, and I'm both the chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, as well as meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle. I study consciousness in people and in animals.
From a medical point of view, consciousness is defined as awareness of self and others and arousal. What that means, that basic mechanism in my brainstem that are absolutely necessary for me to be conscious. They don't provide any of the content of consciousness. You don't love or dream or fear or dread with your brainstem. That really seems to be in us the outermost layer of the brain, which is the most excitable piece of active matter in the known universe, the neocortex.
Most people are what we call naive realists. They assume that what they see or hear, that's actually what's out there. That is a reality. Now, that may be true for certain things. Like you know, we can all agree right now we're sitting inside a room. Nobody believes that we are in a desert or that we in virtual reality. Right? We're all in a room, there is white paper on the ground, etc., etc. So that's consensual reality. But the fact is people fundamentally reinterpret things very, very differently.
For example, of the sense of color. There was a striking phenomena that went viral, I think 2015, called “The Dress.” Hashtag the dress right? Where there was this picture of a dress that was striped, and half of the people, like, including me, saw it unambiguously gold and white. Roughly the other half of humanity insisted that it's blue and black. Now, I believe they're all delusional, but it's a playful example how the same reality can appear very, very different to people. And so we constantly make these unspoken assumptions, it's very difficult to realize, well, this is what I assume about people. This is what I assume about the world that may not necessarily be true.
People and different cultures have sort of explicitly or implicitly devised a whole set of different ways to enable people sort of to be open and curious to the walls in their language of Perception Box, to expand their walls.
This includes education first and foremost, understanding that everyone sees the world slightly differently. Not everyone smells and hears and tastes things in the same way. Learning about other cultures. That we all carry biases and they're unconscious, which means you don't know that you’re biased. Developing good habits by doing things like reading books, watching movies, talking to other people. Yoga, mindfulness, being in the here and now. These are all, traditional, reasonable, well-understood ways to sort of enlargen your Perception Box.
We all live in what I call in the gravitational field of planet ego. Just like we always live in the gravitational field of the planet Earth, right? Now, there are certain conditions when we can begin, just like an astronaut becomes weightless and floats, when we can lose ourself. Literally, we become selfless. When you go into a state of flow, for example. I used to be able to do this when I did computer programing. You can totally lose everything around you and you’re just fully immersed in your program. When you do meditation and certain types of psychedelics.
I had a mystical experience sitting up late on the beach where whatever remained of me became one with the universe. I know it sounds all very woo woo and crazy, but that's what my experience was. At my age, typically, the way you think about the universe and the metaphysics of what really exists, it's pretty firmly established. But it was like an earthquake had really fundamentally shifted the tectonic plates of my understanding.
Ultimately, the Perception Box is instantiated in the brain by the wiring among neurons. That's where sort of the rubber hits the road. And because of your experience, your Perception Box has changed. It resets your mind. You can reinterpret your experiences and look at the same facts in a different light. And if you take that knowledge back into your everyday life, you feel content and you feel in the world.
Take the word “nowhere.” So many of us are nowhere because we're constantly in our phone. So the opposite of mindfulness. We're constantly, “okay, she said, now I have to reply to this, I have to like or not like it,” whatever. Then you look at the same word “nowhere” and you parse it differently; Now here. And now you're here. Now you say, “Okay, now I'm focused. I'm here in my body.”
Losing ourselves in these artifacts, we all know that's not a good habit. It leads to estrangement from interoception, the ability for us to feel at home inside our body. So it's important to get out there in the world and do things. We want people to be open to the world. We want people to be curious. We want people to understand it's not always about you, it's okay if your ego is out of it. I don't have to I have this attitude. I have a choice. I can make a difference.
And suddenly I can look at the same facts and come to a very different conclusion. When you lose a sense of self, when you see I'm just among one among many individuals or many conscious beings, you develop empathy, you develop, positive feelings for other creatures that may have different goals than you, that look at the world in different ways. But we are all engaged in the same voyage, you know, bookended between two eternities.
