Having evolved to deal with human-sized objects (give or take a few orders of magnitude), travelling up to a few tens of miles an hour, in a quantity up to maybe a few tens in number, and over timespans ranging from a fraction of a second to a few tens of years, it turns out that there are a lot of things that the meat computer we call a human brain is not equipped to deal with. If you feel like giving yourself a headache at best, or at worst severely undermining your sanity and keeping yourself awake at night, feel free to carry on reading about the many ways that You Cannot Grasp the True Form of a lot of concepts and phenomena in real life, showing that this trope is not just reserved for fictionland.
- Color and perception both have plenty of unusual examples:
- Ever wondered why Purple Is the New Black? Because there is no black. A true black would reflect no light whatsoever and would look like a hole in space. That only happens in black holes. Since vision works by light reflecting off of objects, and true black is the absorption of light, our human eyes literally cannot see true black. A good demonstration is Vantablack
. That photo is neither a pile of it sitting on a sheet of aluminum foil nor is it a Portable Hole. It's simply a layer of Vantablack coating a sheet of foil. The reason it looks like a blank, formless blob is that it absorbs all the light needed to see the foil's crinkles and ridges. - One of the great challenges for an artist learning advanced color theory is to get comfortable with exploiting the Color Constancy illusion. In any piece with strong Mood Lighting, colors you think you are seeing are usually just slight tints of one or two hues. What looks like a strong green in the image may actually be, say, a pale orange-grey — it only looks green compared to the colors around it.
- The color magenta does not correspond to a single wavelength of light, and is not part of the light spectrum — there is no such thing as "pure" magenta light. Rather, it is the brain's way of interpreting multiple wavelengths of light from disparate parts of the color spectrum being received by your eye at the same time. In the case of magenta, it is a combination of red and violet light, which are from opposite ends of the color spectrum; in order to "properly" interpret this, rather than seeing it as an intermediate color, the human brain instead perceives it as magenta.
Yet while pink is often highlighted as an example of such an "unnatural" color, in reality, the majority of colors humans see are this — anything which is not one of the colors of the rainbow is the human brain's way of interpreting a mixture of different wavelengths of light. Scientists who study this have created a map of colors where only the outer edge of the curve corresponds to light on the visible spectrum, the rest is human perception. Indeed, white and gray are the most common examples — white light is merely light that contains a mixture of light wavelengths in high enough and close-to-equal concentration, whereas gray is the same thing, only there is less stimulation. Thus, while there is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet light, colors like pink, white, and black are mixtures of light. In the color map, a large part is shown as green, because a large number of the possible colors and hues humans can see are shades of green, as human eyes have their greatest peak in the green part of the spectrum. Creatures with different peaks for their visual spectrum would likely interpret such mixed colors in a different way. A fascinating experiment involving a similar illusory color made from tiny checkerboards of green and red proved impossible to describe properly in normal terms. Trained artists could describe aspects of it like its chroma value and saturation, but the color itself refused categorization within the color wheel. - Try to imagine a completely new colour. Just try it. You can't. The brain cannot process or even imagine a color that is outside the range of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans. This is why Don Joyce's "Squant" never ceases to madden people with its premise and Crosley's matter-of-fact discussion.
- Language is also linked to our perception of colors. If a language and culture have a bigger difference between colors, people in that society are better able to distinguish colors. This goes the other way too, as people who lack distinctions for colors are slower to recognize differences between them. However, the idea that they are incapable of doing so is a pure myth; the difference is in fractions of a second of recognition speed, not actual differences in visual acuity. There is evidence that colors that humans cannot manufacture do not have names and are therefore not recognized. Scholars have studied ancient texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, specifically looking at the usage of color words. Many very strange color identifications are given: Green Honeynote , Violet Sheepnote , and Wine-Dark Seas. These were often regarded as "colorful" metaphors until linguist Guy Deutscher realized there is no blue mentioned in them anywhere. At the time there were no blue dyes availablenote and there simply wasn't a word for blue, so people had to use other colors to describe what we now know as blue. This is a pattern across all cultures: color usage appears in stages, and blue is always last. This can also be seen in young children; if they don't yet know a color they'll refer to things of that color by a color they do know. An example, again involving blue, children will refer to the sky as white (which most adults will reflexively say is blue) before they know the color blue.
- Some people have four types of cone cells note in their eyes rather than three, which gives them a small advantage in distinguishing colors, particularly in the red region of the spectrum. Because these genes are carried on the X chromosome, this condition is more common in women, but some men also carry both variants of the red-green gene on a single X chromosome. note People with only two sets of cone cells instead of three (color blindness) or with inadequate numbers of or malfunctioning cone cells (milder forms of color blindness) are less able to distinguish colors, and as a result colors which contain the light of the wavelength, they are "blind" to appear considerably different to them. Related to this are images taken by telescopes (or other instruments for the case) designed to work with wavelengths that do not correspond with visible light, like Spitzer (infrared) or Chandra (X-Rays). The images of Space Clouds that we see that have been taken by them are actually processed false-color images so we can see them with our eyes; if they were sensible to those wavelengths while we'd see something more or less with the same aspect (ie: an infrared-bright region of star formation, an X-Ray emitting galactic nucleus, etc) their "colors" would be quite different.
- In (amateur) astronomy, an interesting physiological effect takes often place when observing a double star, as the less bright of the pair is seen in the complementary color of the brightest one -ie, when observing a double whose brightest component is orange seeing the less luminous as green or blue, even if it's actually yellow or white. Likewise, contrast effects on them can let at least in some people see colors not actually present on stars, or at least not in one of that spectral type (faint pink, deep blue, etc).
- Starlight in general. It takes the Sun's light eight minutes to reach the Earth, so the "Sun" lighting up the sky right now is actually what it looked like eight minutes ago, and the Alpha Centauri system (including Proxima Centauri) is as it was 4 years in the past when we view it through telescopes. For more distant stars, like the Virgo cluster, we're seeing how they looked when dinosaurs walked the earth, or even earlier. Astronomers call this phenomenon "lookback time".
- Human brains are designed to perceive the world in three dimensions, but the human eye only perceives the world in two dimensions. The brain uses the 2-dimensional input from each eye in addition to some image process recognition to construct the perception of a third dimension inside the brain, which is why people with only one eye have diminished depth perception. This can be thrown off in various well-known ways, such as presenting a different image to each eye — something 3D glasses take advantage of to create a stronger illusion of the third dimension from a 2D image. Many visual illusions take advantage of the brain's visual processing — perspective in paintings is a matter of tricking the eye into seeing 3D distance which is not actually present, while real-world environments can be constructed in order to trick the brain into seeing a 3D space as being larger, smaller, or otherwise strangely shaped. Because the brain is designed to construct 3D images, it makes visualizing an object which has more than three spatial dimensions, such as some mathematical constructs, very strange — one of the more common ways of doing so is essentially taking 3-dimensional "slices" of a 4D object, and presenting them in series over time. Similarly, human brains are designed to only perceive one dimension of time. Time and space aren't intrinsically different from one another, so in the same way that a 1-dimensional being could not perceive the concept of turning around, we can only see the flow of time in one direction. If the universe had two or more dimensions of time, then you could "turn around" and face the past. What that would look like is anyone's guess.
- The human brain is in fact so good at this, that it serves as the entire basis for 3D graphics and games. Unlike normal depth perception and vision where both eyes see different images and use this to construct a 3D space, 3D graphics render a 3D space into a 2D image shown on a display device such as a monitor. Every time you play a 3D game (which is to say, many modern games), your brain is constructing a representation of the 3 dimensional game world you move your character within from a series of single 2D images (assuming you're not playing using a VR headset or suchlike). Naturally, anyone with monocular vision also relies on this on a day to day basis, though it is harder than with binocular vision. This bears repeating: you can give the brain a single changing 2D image over time and construct a 3D space from this. With all the assumptions and processing this requires, perhaps the more surprising thing is how often it gets it right instead of how it can easily be tricked.
- Even the concept of the third dimension can be mind-blowing to some people. Various conditions like amblyopia exist, which can inhibit or remove depth perception. As an attempt to explain it to people without the condition, imagine only viewing the world through the screen on a digital camera.
- Blind spots. Your brain compensates for the existing blind spots in your eyes (spots that are not covered with cones or rods due to the presence of the optical nerve), filling in the lost information. People who get retinal burns (because of handling lasers or arc welders carelessly, for example) get additional blind spots in addition to the natural ones. The brain input-processing mechanism conceals these spots and the afflicted human thinks he's perfectly okay, up until the point that enough of his retina is burned that the brain is no longer able to compensate.
- Extremely distant objects in the sky are so far away that the brain does not naturally model them as being three-dimensional objects in space. This is especially true of the Sun, Moon, and stars, all of which are huge objects which are extremely large distances away, but the brain does not naturally perceive them as large, nor accurately model their distance, due to lack of perspective.
- This is why the moon appears to be larger when it is low on the horizon versus up in the sky. There isn't an atmospheric lensing effect as many people believe, it's simply a visual illusion. The exact reasons are still debated — sometimes it's stated to be because there are trees/buildings/the ground now visible in proximity to it and your brain is better able to judge a relative size, but it seems to work just as well with a featureless sea as the background. Another explanation is that we are simply used to objects on the horizon being smaller, but the moon doesn't become smaller, so we automatically compensate.
- Even non-celestial distant objects can mess with the brain's perception if there is no relative comparison. Just look at a plane in the sky, you have no way of judging how high or how fast it is moving other than "it's small so it's got to be pretty high". From the ground 2 planes (or their contrails) could appear to intersect with each other and nearly collide, when in actuality there may be 2 miles or more difference in their altitudes. Without perspective, the brain just gives up and renders it as a 2D image.
- Forget vision. All your senses are essentially lying to you 24/7. There's nothing inherently "sweet" about sugar. There's nothing inherently "loud" about a gunshot. There's nothing inherently "painful" about a stubbed toe. These are simply the signals your body sends to your brain, in order for your body to find the most desirable environment. Just ask anyone who lacks vision, or hearing, or smell, or taste, or any other sense — they simply aren't able to detect it, thanks to something in their body and/or brain not functioning the way it should. As a matter of fact, their experiences are arguably far closer to reality!
- Ever wondered why Purple Is the New Black? Because there is no black. A true black would reflect no light whatsoever and would look like a hole in space. That only happens in black holes. Since vision works by light reflecting off of objects, and true black is the absorption of light, our human eyes literally cannot see true black. A good demonstration is Vantablack
- Because the brain is essentially a very complicated computer made out of meat, brain damage can severely mess up people's perception of reality.
- A patient with the two hemispheres of their brain severed may be asked to pick up an object with one hand, pick up the object named, but then call the object by the wrong name when they are asked what object it is, or vice-versa. Such people may also only be able to solve math shown to one of their eyes; if it is shown to the wrong eye exclusively, they may not be able to properly solve the problem.
- Left-side paralysis caused by brain damage, not direct nerve damage, leads to the common illusion that the non-functioning body parts belong to somebody else. The reason is that since the damage originates from the brain, there is no feedback from the limbs to signal that something is wrong with them since they are technically totally functional. Therefore, the brain invents the idea that the limbs must belong to somebody else. In cognitive science, this is referred to as confabulation. It is actually rather scary that a person under such an illusion is more or less incapable of understanding that they ARE, in fact, not right. They will acknowledge any arguments made by people trying to convince them, but they will not change their minds. When the brain no longer needs to delude itself, people are confused about how they could have ever believed something so ridiculous. In some cases, the same defensive mental mechanism reoccurs, and people conveniently forget their previous puzzlement. It should be noted, this happens in people who are otherwise perfectly reasonable, sane, and rational, as far as it is possible to judge.
- We rely on our memories far more than we realize, so it's next to impossible to put yourself in the place of someone who has Retrograde (loss of old memories) or Anterograde (inability to form new memories) Amnesia. As a result of damage, their brains simply lose the ability to store neural information.
- Aphasia. Depending on the type, someone can understand speech but not produce it, produce speech but not understand it, have an extremely limited vocabulary, or completely lose all understanding of language.
- Hemispatial Neglect. After receiving damage to one side of the brain, a patient loses some or all of the ability to recognize things in half of their field of vision. They can still see it, but they don't completely perceive or process it. When asked to fill in objects like a clock, they may compress all of the numbers into one side or only write half of them. This can extend to ignoring food on one side of their plate unless they view it from the eye that isn't controlled by the hemisphere affected by the condition, only shaving or putting make-up on one side, and even the belief that one limb or even one half of the body doesn't belong to them. This effect even extends into memories, where patients recalling things like objects from memory can only draw one-half of them.
- Synesthesia is another odd side effect of how brains function. Someone with synesthesia not only perceives the world in the same way that others do but additional senses are stimulated as nerve signals cross over in the brain. Each synesthetic person has their own way in which their senses cross over; some see sounds, or hear colors, or feel colors. This is a very strange sort of qualia, and even two synesthetic people who share the same crossings-over may not perceive them in the same way.
- Humans are extremely bad at understanding large numbers.
- This is a problem when it comes to making decisions, as people will actually end up caring more about a single person than a thousand people because a single person is easier for them to understand; the same applies to donating money to save a small or large number of geese from an environmental catastrophe — the larger cited number actually drew SMALLER donations in one study.
- Douglas Adams pointed out that infinity is flat and uninteresting, since it doesn't present magnitude or scale, ergo, really big things are necessary to show just how big it is. A basic example is the Googolplex, a number so large that it cannot be represented longhand, even if we filled the known universe with protons and wrote a zero on each one.
- An even bigger number is Graham's number which cannot be expressed with any standard system of numerical representation including such things as exponent stacks (e.g. a^b^c^d^e...). However, like all things, it can be expressed using certain specialized forms of recursive notation. Graham's number is the maximum limit of the number of unique variations of a particular problem. The minimal limit, at the time, was thought to be 6. It has since been increased to 13. Numbers this large can't be constructed physically, and cannot be simulated on a 1 to 1 basis.
- Want to try for the slightest idea anyway? Firstly, to get an idea of how quickly some sequences increase, consider x = x^x, and we start at 2. This sequence goes 2, 4 (2^2), 256 (4^4), ~3.2x10^616... 4 numbers in and we're already at a value hundreds of orders of magnitude more than the number of particles in the observable universe. Now imagine we're looking for the 64th number in this sequence. Crazy. This is nothing in comparison.
- Secondly, the idea of hyperoperations. For example, consider 3+3+3, 3x3x3, 3^3^3. This can be taken further, with up arrow notation being used to denote this, and adding another arrow essentially stating "do what you did at the previous operation level this many times"; multiplying is repeatedly adding, exponentiating (to the power of) is repeatedly multiplying, tetrating is repeatedly exponentiating (i.e. building a power tower with this many levels), pentating means repeatedly tetrating (build a power tower, work out the number, build a new power tower this high), and so on. 3↑3 = 3x3x3 = 27. 3↑↑3 = 3^3^3 = 3^27 ≈ 7.6 trillion. 3↑↑↑3 = 3↑↑(3↑↑3) = 3↑↑~7.6 trillion, meaning a power tower of 3s that is ~7.6 trillion high. Needless to say, this is a ridiculous number, and you can quickly see how fast the numbers grow with each arrow we add. This is nothing in comparison.
- How crazy is this? If Graham's number was calculated by starting with 3↑↑3 instead, the second number in the sequence would still be 3↑↑↑↑↑...↑3, with ~7.6 trillion arrows. We can't even get to the 4th arrow without problems. This is nothing in comparison.
- Graham's number is really calculated starting with 3↑↑↑↑3 = 3↑↑↑(3↑↑↑3) = 3↑↑(3↑↑...(3↑↑(3↑↑3))). How many 3s do we have in the last expression which uses tetration (↑↑)? 3↑↑↑3. Yes, our power tower trillions of steps high is the amount of times we tetrate (↑↑) note . In other words, build a power tower of 3s ~7.6 trillion high note . Calculate this number, and build a new power tower of 3s this many levels high. Calculate that and build a new tower this many levels high. Repeat this process so many times we can just about express the number of times we repeat it in written form using exponent stacks. And as a reminder, if we tetrate merely twice 3↑↑(3↑↑3) we get our crazy power tower number trillions of 3s high. This insanely large number, is the number of arrows used in the second number in the sequence. And we repeat this another 62 more times to get our 64th number.
- If you start climbing our ~7.6 trillion tall tower of 3s, you only get a few 3s in before you couldn't write the resulting number out longhand. We haven't even begun to work out how tall our tower of 3s would be for the very first number in the sequence, and we've already reached numbers so large they cannot be written out in full. You can't even write the power tower for the first number in the sequence. You can just about barely write out the number of times you build power towers for the first number in the sequence. If we tried writing out 3↑↑↑3 in the form of 3^3^3... assuming 25 "3s" per line and 50 lines per page, this would take about 3 billion double sided pages. With a long 1000 page book, it would take 3 million books to complete this.
- Short version? It's a large number. Don't think about it too hard. Seriously. Your brain will thank you.
- And Graham’s Number is small compared to some other numbers used in serious mathematical proofs.
- Infinity itself is difficult for most people to understand, and also has very strange consequences, as two infinite quantities are not necessarily equal, and some infinities are, effectively, bigger than othersnote . Related to this is infinitesimal, which is something that can only be described as a value that is infinitely small, but still reasonably significant. It's probably first heard when taking a physics class or learning about integrals. There are also an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, or indeed, between any two values.
- Another concept that people may struggle with are different representations of the same value. For example: 0.999... is the same as 1. Not "it's almost close" or "so close it doesn't matter", it is equivalent to 1. There are proofs that show this using different methods.
- Humans are so bad at understanding large numbers, even mundane ones like "one billion" are very difficult for most people to truly visualize. Much has been said about how difficult it is for most people to truly conceive of just how absurdly wealthy billionaires actually are.
- Fractals.
- Their number of dimensions varies whether it's topological or not, and their "true" (Hausdorff) number of dimensions is often non-integer. The Menger sponge, for example, is an object which has zero volume and an infinite surface area. This means that any Menger sponge you'll see is only an approximation.
- For another example, look at Sierpinski's Triangles (imagine a Triforce where you replace every triangle with another Triforce ad infinitum). It has roughly 1.585 dimensions (more precisely, log(3)/log(2).
- Yet another example in Geometry is the myriagon: a polygon consisting of ten thousand sides. However, on paper, the sides are far too small to see with the naked eye. What we wind up being able to see is a perfect circle.
- Averted in general with mathematics and geometry, however; while these things might be difficult to visualize, people with the right mathematical training are able to fully understand mathematical concepts on their own "true" terms without resorting to visual metaphors (in fact, learning to do this is essential to progress; not learning to do this is a large part of why some people find math hard).
- Fractals are the reason for the so-called coastline paradox. If you ever looked at various measurements of the same coastline, it's likely that they're all different. The problem is since natural coastlines aren't well defined, one has to use a series of lines between points on the coastline to make an estimate. However, the more points you use, the longer the coastline becomes, to the point where you can create a fractal, which means the coastline now has infinite length.
- Their number of dimensions varies whether it's topological or not, and their "true" (Hausdorff) number of dimensions is often non-integer. The Menger sponge
- Although imaginary numbersnote are Exactly What It Says on the Tin, they actually have, more or less, practical and perhaps physical applications. That Other Wiki has plenty of examples.
- This Cracked article contains some examples, particularly one mental disorder that makes it so you can only grasp the form of one thing at a time.
- Your own incompetence. Competency in a task is linked to your ability to judge your ability at a said task; thus, incompetent people, with no training in the task, will consider themselves to be vastly more competent than they actually are. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect; however, it can be mitigated with training. Unfortunately, the very incompetence of the people may prevent them from seeking out said training, because they don't realize how incompetent they actually are. There is one exception to this rule: studies of people with clinical depression revealed that many individuals with depression have a far more realistic grasp of their own limitations than the average person. Think about that for a second.
- Particles at the quantum level. To clarify, most subatomic particles exhibit 'wave-particle duality', meaning sometimes they behave like a wave, sometimes like a particle, and their true nature (if indeed they have one) is neither. In fact, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle essentially states that the more you know about one's position, the less you know about its speed or trajectory, and visa versa. The kicker comes when you learn that this is not due to a shortcoming in our measuring equipment, but a law of the universe itself; there is a hard limit on how much the universe will allow you to learn about a particle, since the mere act of observing changes its nature. Since our brains are evolved to deal with concepts on the macroscopic scale, this is very hard to imagine.
- Dark Matter/Energy. A postulated form of "something" that makes up over 90% of the universe but does not have any interaction with the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, the only "Observable" effect, and hint that it exists, is its effect on gravity. Humanity (and all life as we know it) is made of "normal" matter and evolved to perceive the world through a thin slice of the EM spectrum. Through technology we have been able to extend that thin slice to allow us to visualize other parts of the EM spectrum (which really makes another example of this trope: we cannot grasp the true form of any part of the EM spectrum except for the visible spectrum, only convert it into visual light which we are able to understand), but we are still limited to the parts of the universe that are also able to interact with the EM spectrum. Something that doesn't interact with it is therefore completely unimaginable.
- All of Planck's constants are incomprehensible except two: Planck mass and Planck energy. The rest describe things like the smallest unit of time or length to maximum temperature. Planck mass, while describing something on the quantum level, is the mass of a flea egg, while Planck energy is a tank of gasoline.
- The concept of a timeless universe.
- According to this idea, the flow of time as we perceive it, from past to future, is just an illusion. We 3D beings are only capable of perceiving small points in time (the fourth dimension) happening around us, while there is no intrinsic difference between any given point. They are all as real as an ever-conceivable point in space. A good comparison would be to look at a river. The entire river exists regardless of our position in it, but we can only see the portion we are swimming in right now. Technically speaking, this also means everything that ever has and ever will happen is happening all at once.
- If you could see yourself in the fourth dimension, you'd look like a huge worm made of every single version of yourself from every moment across your entire life. There would be your embryo at one end and your deceased self at the other. All of this is without getting into the idea of branching pathways.
- Photons and other massless particles (which all travel at the speed of light) experience no time note , and so from its 'perspective' it is emitted and absorbed in the same instant.
- The amount of radiation in the universe that we can perceive is infinitesimally small. If the entire EM spectrum were laid out from one end of the United States to the end, the visible light portion would be 1/100th the thickness of a piece of paper. That is everything our eyes can detect. Just try and imagine Radio waves, X-rays, or Gamma rays on their own, without any false color images.
- The universe itself. It goes on forever, and has no boundaries, but is at the same time, finite.note If you were able to move infinitely fast, you would just end up where you started. Bill Bryson used this example to try to explain it in A Short History of Nearly Everything: Imagine a two-dimensional being who comes through a dimensional portal to Earth. He tries to determine the size of the Earth by traveling along its surface in a straight line, but keeps coming back to his starting point, and can't figure out how he did it. This is what is happening in the universe, which is "curving" in a way that our brains just can't really grasp. Just try to conceive how this can happen.
There's also the issue of attempting to grasp its size: If the distances just in our Solar System are already mind-numbing, a light-year is almost ten trillion kilometers, but at galactic (short of cosmological) scale is insignificant (just our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a size of one hundred thousand times that and the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest major galaxy, is at more than 2.5 million l.y.). That justifies to a point why Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale — simply put, even astronomers cannot really wrap their heads around what those distances really mean. - A lot of the really pioneering minds in advanced mathematics tend to have at least minor breakdowns now and then, particularly those studying esoteric things like set theory (aka infinity + 1), alternative systems of math like knot theory, and those studying problems which may or may not actually have solutions. Apparently, it's hard on a brain to spend your days trying to grasp the true form of things that exist in fractional dimensions braided around a 4-sphere.
- Negative mass. Try and imagine holding an object that weighs -5 kilograms.
- An object such as this would be counterintuitive, but not especially mind-bending. It would simply have the opposite reaction to normal to any force applied to it; gravity would repel it, pushing on it would make it accelerate toward your hand, etc.
- Tornadoes in open fields. Most people who witness a massive tornado in empty fields, find themselves confused if the funnel is moving toward them or just sitting stationary. This is due to humans having difficulty comprehending spatial awareness and object enormity without having a reference point. The effect will often make it seem like the tornado isn't moving - maybe even moving away - when in actuality it's coming straight for you.
- Similarly, oceans. Standing on a beach, your horizon is, at most 5 km distant. If you were looking at the Pacific, the nearest landmass (assuming you weren't exceptionally lucky enough for your geodesic to intersect with an island) would be one-third of the world away.
- The concept of Cessation of Existence after death. Try and imagine what true oblivion is — you perceive nothing, you feel nothing, you remember nothing, and you are nothing. You can't. You simply can't. The closest thing you can imagine is a dreamless sleep, but you obviously can't imagine sleeping forever. At least you do have one reference point unlike the next entry, in that you can compare it to the time before you were born.Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is... not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, no — what you've been is not on boats. - Cessation of Existence hard enough to imagine? Take it up a notch and try to imagine the universe itself not existing. Your brain will probably break right here if you think too hard for too long, because not only would space and time not exist, but even the concepts of them can't exist. Even nothing itself can't exist. By way of an analogy, the normal universe is like a stage production, and a featureless void of empty space is like an empty stage; pretty easy to imagine nothing on the stage and no production taking place. The universe not existing is like there being no stage or even no such a concept of a stage. There is no reference point for this, because our very concept of nothing requires something for the nothing to be in. Probably best to go lie down now, if you aren't already.
- Sleep. When you do it, it might feel like a sudden stop-and-start, but your brain doesn't actually shut down. You simply lose conscious control for anywhere from a few minutes to several hours while your body acts on its own, maintaining its vitals and keeping you busy with dreams until you wake back up. Most of what happens then doesn't even stick and will be forgotten the moment you wake up. Since the brain is still active, we don't even know the true purpose of sleep in the first place. All we know for sure is, if we go too long without it, we die.
- Someone else's thoughts. As C. S. Lewis put it in The Horse and His Boy, "No one is told any story but their own."
- While you might be able to get a sense of what someone else is thinking, you can never tell exactly what someone else has on their mind. You can't climb into their consciousness and experience the world through their perceptions. The way colors, smells, sounds, and language are interpreted in your brain are completely unique to you and only you. This is the only way you'll experience the world your entire life. We aren't even born with the ability to consider that other people can have different perspectives and mental representations than our own.
- There's no solid way of knowing what another person would do in your place. Even if it's someone you're close friends with or a family member you've to know your whole life, you'll never know for certain what they would do in your place. Everyone has their own views on morality, truth, fairness, justice, mercy, acceptance, etc. Unless a person tells you outright what they think about something, you'll never know for certain how they interpret it. You'll never know if they're on your side or if they disagree with you completely.
- This state of mental variation means all of us are truly unique. Something you dislike about yourself might actually be something another person really loves about you. The people around you can still manage to surprise you, even if you've known them for years. Most importantly, even if it feels like you're the only one in the world who feels a certain way, there are countless other people who have an idea of what you're going through. Not a total sense of what you're feeling, but an idea of it. People who care about you and want you to be happy. Many of them have greater knowledge and experience than you and are more than happy to share it. All you have to do is ask.
- To all the people out there who have self-depreciating tendencies or insecurities about yourself, how often have you thought someone finds a quality about you annoying (e.g. you fear that someone thinks you talk too much), or thought that they outright hate you because of it? These fearful thoughts can even escalate into an argument with you accusing the other person of hating you, but then you calm down and find out that no, that is not what they think of you at all. Such defensiveness can even happen with someone you're close with; no matter how close you are, or how well you think you know the other person, you're still stuck with the mindset and the thought process you have. All it takes is an innocent inciting event to trigger your brain to try and justify why the other person acted the way they did, and draw a conclusion that may not be entirely accurate, and cause you to react appropriately. You cannot even conceive the possibility that the conclusion you'd drawn may not be the truth of events, because you are not wired to think that way. In times like this, it is important to maintain healthy communication and avert Poor Communication Kills, and remember that if you ever find yourself doubting what someone else thinks of you, all you have to do is ask, because people you've formed a strong bond with will remind you that You Are Better Than You Think You Are.
- Many people on the autism spectrum describe their perception of the world around them in this way due to the way they process sensory input. Aquamarine Blue 5, a book of essays written by autistics, describes experiences like these.
- If the "Interface Theory of Perception" is to be believed, this is an evolutionary mechanic. The gist of its argument is that each species has evolved a unique visual perception of reality to benefit their unique behavior. A good metaphor compares our perception of reality to the user interface of a computer, which masks the complex, inner workings of a computer from the user. To test this phenomenon, an "interface game" was set up to determine which of two groups would survive: organisms that perceive an objective reality versus organisms that perceive a subjective reality. The truth-perceiving organisms died out.
- People exposed to something that they have literally no frame of reference for in their prior experience often fail to construct what they are seeing in their minds. A classic example is the Native Americans believing Cortez's horsemen were giant creatures with two heads because they had never seen a horse, let alone a man riding one, before (it's believed that myths of centaurs similarly originated from garbled memories that the Greeks had of horse-riding invaders from before tamed horses were a common sight in Eurasia). Another famous example is the crazed German private who babbled to his superior about "a crocodile in the trenches" upon seeing a tank for the first time.
- A fictional example of this would be how the rabbits in Watership Down perceive motor vehicles; they see them as giant creatures called "hrududu".
- While we've managed to crack our own genome and discover every combination of nucleotides that make us who we are (although there's still work to be done in discovering every protein that can be coded from all of them, which is the other half of the challenge), pondering the nature of our consciousness is enough to make our brains hurt. Picture this; throughout most of human history, humans haven't been born one at a time. It's more or less been a constant that multiple humans happened to take their first breaths, and feel their first stimuli as conscious beings simultaneously. While we know how the body develops from a single zygote (and the gametes that combine to form it), why exactly is it, that out of all the people born at that one time, our consciousness happened to be assigned to the body we have in particular? This question continues to puzzle people to this day, and it's no wonder that there are countless theories that have persisted through time in attempting to answer it.
- Humans are terrible at processing large scales of time. To give you an example, let's say that the entire history of the Earth was condensed into 24 hours. It takes the planet about eight-ten minutes to initially form, the moon forms five minutes later, and the planet takes about an hour to cool enough for water to form. Life doesn't come into existence until around four and a half later, and it takes another six hours for bacteria as we know them to even form. The first multi-cellular organisms don't emerge until 8:30 PM on the clock. Where do humans fall on this clock? If four billion years are condensed into 24 hours, then we first emerged at 11:58:43 PM. Our modern civilization? Not even a full second. And this is without even getting into the timescales of the universe, which is over 3 times older than Earth. Good luck wrapping your mind around all that.
- The In Harmony with Nature trope comes almost entirely from this. Predator-prey populations tend to show chaotic behavior within their ecological limits, where the sizes of populations change in a way that may appear random but is, in fact, obeying deterministic laws based only on the relationship between a population and its food source illustrated by the Lotka–Volterra equation. An experimental example of this was shown in an eight-year study on small Baltic Sea creatures such as plankton, which were isolated from the rest of the ocean. Each member of the food web was shown to take turns multiplying and declining, even though the scientists kept the outside conditions constant. An article in the journal Nature stated that advanced mathematical techniques proved the indisputable presence of chaos in this food web, while short-term prediction is possible, long-term prediction is not.
- To expand on the human point, a recent archaeological discovery found that the human race may be 150,000 years older than we previously thought. That would bump up our time frame on the clock by about...12 seconds.
- And, it's not just with the past, but also the future as well, especially considering the time required for the fates of the Earth, the Solar System, and the universe to play out.
- Sometimes, noises synthesized using specific hardware or software will make the noise sound "off" when played on different programs. This happens quite a bit with Video Games or even PC noises.
- A good example of this are Lavos's Roar from Chrono Trigger and Odio's Saint Alethea attack from Live A Live. It's actually rather difficult to replicate the noises during emulation, which is why you can often look up videos of them and hear something completely different than what you remember when played.
- MIDI music made in The '90s or the Turn of the Millennium can also result in the sounds either sounding weird, or simply not playing because the computer doesn't know how to play back that sound, or it plays it differently. Other times they can devolve into weird sounds.
- To someone with dyscalculia or Dyslexia, this is how numbers and words can be seen as them, respectively. Everyone else sees something that they just cannot perceive in any way.
- Sometimes, you don't even have to be Dyscalculic to feel this with math — one reason Everyone Hates Mathematics is that as any math teacher can tell you, once you hit Calculus, half the class will understand what you are saying (or even what they are seeing) while the others will interpret it as scribbles and jargon. The only way they can comprehend it will amount to making the teacher feel they cannot grasp the true form of how they perceive mathematics.
- As difficult as it is to imagine long stretches of time, shorter ones maybe even worse. The smallest duration of time humanity has ever been able to measure is 12 attoseconds. 1 attosecond is one quintillionth of a second, which is how long it takes for a photon to travel the length of two hydrogen atoms. To put it in another perspective, if you were immortal and could perceive things in an attosecond time frame, the light would seem frozen to you. You could live out the entire age of the universe, from its birth to the end of star formation, in the time it would take the average person to blink.
- Linguistics. Some letters and words have no equivalent in other languages. While some languages make up for this by having the word be untranslated and taking it as a loanword (Especially common in English and Creole languages), others make the best guess they got. Reading some older works that were translated often includes notes mentioning how the words can have different meanings and it's all based upon interpretation. This is also one of the reasons why some words are frequently mispronounced by non-native speakers — since the letters all have a completely different sound (or no equivalent) in other languages.
- When you get to languages that are even older, it gets even more complicated. For example, the letters Tl — which do not normally go together in English — are not unheard of in some Native American tribes (Tlingit, Tlaxcala) and represent a sound the Roman alphabet cannot represent: the alveolar lateral fricative.
- We know most of the Greek pronunciations of some deities, words, or names in Egyptian mythology because the only way their names were written down (that we know of, or can even translate) could not be translated. This is especially the case with the Egyptian deity Thoth. "Thoth" is actually his Greek name — his Egyptian name was pronounced way differently. This is lampshaded when The Kane Chronicles has the characters meet him, he has no real way to spell his Egyptian name in English, so he pronounces it phonetically as the only way the English-speaking Kanes (and the audience) can understand.
- This is also a reason behind names for some people — "Shit" to an Indian person would be pronounced as "Shee", yet English speakers see names like "Akshit" or "Dikshit" and pronounce them as "Ack-shit" or "Dick-shit".
- Some languages actually leave out parts of the word-as-written. For example, Ancient Hebrew leaves out vowels. This means that, even if we can understand the written word, without a fluent speaker we can only blindly guess at how it's pronounced. The most famous example is the true name of the Abrahamic God, the tetragrammaton - YHWH (or if you prefer, YHVH).
- The singularity of a black hole. You try and wrap your mind around an object with infinite density and a volume of zero.
- There's a phenomenon named saccadic masking: basically, your eyes are constantly making movements as you look around (which are called saccades). As you may have noticed, your eyes don't scroll from one object you're looking at to another like a video camera, but instead, seem to abruptly "cut" from one "shot" to another. This is because the brain edits these out for a number of reasons (seeing them would take more brainpower, most of them would be too blurry to be useful, and you'd likely get dizzy.)
- The brain itself. It's a lump of gray matter that weighs a little over a kilogram and runs on about 15 watts of power, yet it's capable of storing an estimated 2.5 petabytes of informationnote . With that, it can concoct the most amazing, bizarre, grotesque, horrific, and hilarious ideas with even the smallest prompting. While machines can outmatch it in certain areas, it has the unique ability to understand and recognize things, assign identity and value to them, and does so with a minuscule fraction of the energy and processing power. It even named and assigned identity to itself. How does it do all this? Even it doesn't really know.
- Certain math functions, when given a transformation, can produce a shape or object that most people struggle to understand. A famous one is Gabriel's horn, an object with finite volume but infinite surface area.
- This trope is the whole reason why cartoons, video games, and motion pictures work in the first place. They are really just a series of still pictures shown in rapid succession, but they go by so fast your brain can only make sense of it by combining them into a moving image.
- Lightbulbs don't actually give off a constant glow, but flicker at a certain rate (usually 60 Hertz, or 60 times per second). This is normally too fast for the human eye to notice, but if the bulbs are almost burned out, or the electrical connection is bad,they often do flicker noticably due to the "flicker rate" slowing down.
- The underlying reality of the universe itself, assuming there is one we can even interact with (feel free to look up a Boltzmann brain or a Brain in a Jar if you have got this far and somehow still feel compelled to read more instead of running away screaming). The model of the world we construct in our heads is a bizarre hallucination closer to a dream than reality, with made up qualia note being used as labels for the tiny amount we can perceive with our senses, as covered elsewhere. If you look out the window, every single thing you can see is arbitrary, from the colours you experience to even the fact that you "see" rather than "hear". Even something simple like the concept of a solid object is a lie; a model the brain uses to represent "you can't put your hand through that due to electromagnetic repulsion", with the most solid object being mostly empty space. Everything we can perceive is A Form You Are Comfortable With for the entire universe, the brain's best attempt at making sense of things using extremely limited sensory data mostly based around finding a fresh piece of fruit and avoiding being eaten by that nearby sabre-toothed tiger.
