Look at It Go

The job of all the senses is to pick up clues from the outside world in various forms: lightwaves, changes in air pressure, chemical signals. That information is translated into millions of tiny electrical pulses. Your brain reads these electrical pulses, in effect, like a computer reads code. It uses that code to actively construct your reality, fooling you into believing this controlled hallucination is real. Then it uses its senses as fact-checkers, rapidly tweaking what it’s showing you whenever it detects something unexpected.

It’s because of this process that we sometimes “see” things that aren’t actually there. Say it’s dusk and you think you’ve seen a strange, stooping man with a top hat and a cane loitering by a gate, but you soon realise it’s just a tree stump and a bramble. You say to your companion, “I thought I saw a weird guy over there.” You did see that weird guy over there. Your brain thought he was there so it put him there. Then when you approached and new, more accurate, information was detected, it rapidly redrew the scene, and your hallucination was updated.

from The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

These paragraphs stood out to me as I was reading The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. They reminded me particularly of a scene in my novel where a character is developing new senses and has to learn to distinguish between things such as light waves and sound waves. The two paragraphs also interested me because, like other people, I sometimes see things that aren’t there. For example, my husband and I used to have a Ghost Cat. We’d see something out of the corner of our eye, and it would assume the shape of a cat, until we turned to look more closely and realized that there was nothing there.

Now that we don’t have real cats, we don’t see the Ghost Cat anymore. This suggests that the brain needs to be primed in some way to see a “phantom.” That is, the brain can easily conjure up the phantom of a man next to a gate or a scurrying cat, because those are reasonable things to see. It’s unlikely to conjure up the image of a squid near a gate, though. But, perhaps it could see a monster if you were scared, or an angel if you wished desperately to see one, or any number of otherworldly images created from your greatest hopes, fears, and expectations.

As I was walking in the woods the other day, I saw a phantom. It was not a thing I expected to see in the woods, but it was something that existed in my surface thoughts–a school bus. I took a picture of it.

The Phantom School Bus

In reality it was just a patch of yellow leaves, but for a fraction of a second it was a school bus driving through the woods. Even now, knowing that it’s just leaves, I can still see the vague outlines of the bus. The image is blurred because the bus is moving fast and far away. Look at it go!

The Phantom School Bus was the oddest thing that I saw in the woods that day, odder even than the October blueberries. But, the woods were full of interesting things, and I have many pictures yet to share. More posts to come soon.

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