Albert Moukheiber

The Importance of Context

“Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all.”

Gregory Bateson

Our brain, from the moment we are awake, spends its time making assumptions on reality, interpreting it, filling its voids.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we can see what we want to see all the time; in other words, that nothing really exists and that we are free to shape our own reality simply by imagining it in our head: in the context of the optical illusion we’ve previously examined, I’m free to see a figure facing forward or with their back to me, but I can’t see this figure as a tree or a banana, for example.

we learn from these two examples of bistable illusion is that human beings tend to blindly trust their perception, to the point of considering it to be shared by everyone.

We can thank our brain for this, as it performs “tricks”

The outcome is that our knowledge of things and of the world is always relative.

Cognitive science is a fairly recent field, currently in full expansion.

the relativity of wrong. Contrary to popular belief, right and wrong are rarely ever absolute, but often rather relative.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

But our eyes, our ears, our tongue and our skin are actually receptors which will transform signals reflected by the outside world (optical, acoustic, olfactory…) into electrical signals. It is these thousands of electrical signals that our brain will process and filter, and which will enable us to mentally reconstruct the world.