Cognitive Reality

A Rorschach inkblot

"Every phone a human utters is necessarily different from every other phone in some way, although the difference may be minute. So, if any phones sound the same to you, it is never because they sound the same in real terms. It is only because your brain tells you they are the same. Likewise, if two phones sound differently to you, it’s only because your brain tells you they sound differently. As you learn a language, your brain optimizes your perception of sound to tell you which phones are different and which phones are the same in your language (see (N. C. Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006)). It does this on the basis of the distinctions you must attend to if you are to distinguish the sounds of morphemes in your language. If you don’t need to perceive a difference between phones, your brain tells you they are the same. If your brain tells you phones are the same when they are really very different, you have practically no way of knowing what is true unless you fight back against the workings of your brain. It may be telling you that phones sound alike when they sound drastically different to people of another language, and the phones that your brain tells you sound obviously different may sound absolutely identical to other people. This will be contrary to your experience and you will doubt and reject the idea, but the idea will be true and you will be wrong. It is your experience filtered through your brain’s processing that is not concretely real. Of course, what your brain tells you is cognitively real for you, but you need to understand that people of other languages have different cognitive realities that make them think differently than you do, and their phonetic realities are not your phonetic realities" (emphasis added).

The above is an exert from my Study of Language class handbook, written by my teacher. It illustrates through the metaphor of language a very absolute truth - that some things are relative to your experience of them. I do not subscribe to the philosophy that all things are relative; for one thing, that statement is an immediate logical contradiction, and for another, it is blatantly not true. However, many things in life are subject to our experience of them, just like how we perceive someone speaking the word "sink" and the word "think". To English speakers those words are clearly different, laughably so. But if you speak German, the distinction is not so concrete, and indeed, some might not even be able to tell the difference at all.

The world would be a much better place, on a personal, national, and worldwide level, if we would all just invest the time to uncover our own "cognitive realities" and stop reacting instinctively to others'. So much of the conflict in history, between people and nations, stems from misunderstanding. And misunderstanding results when we process other people's actions through our own cognitive reality when in fact they are acting informed by their own, separate cognitive reality. We throw around words like "normal" and "reality" and expect them to be absolute and everyone to know what we mean when we say them, but in fact those words are some of the most subjective and relative words in any language. What someone means by them varies, not just in different cultures, but within them as well.

Who you think you are and how you react to the world is very much (at least partly) a function of what experiences you've had as you've lived your life. Your family, your culture, your circumstances growing up, the people you've interacted with in any way, your beliefs, how much sleep you got last night - all of them contribute to how you view the world at any one moment. Which is why that ten people might have eight or nine, if not ten, different reactions to the same thing. The hard thing for us as humans to accept is that just because someone's reaction is different from our own, it does not immediately follow that it is wrong. Someone's logic for reacting the way they did might not be immediately apparent to us, but it is usually the case that when you put a little time into attempting to understand that reaction, some kind of logic will emerge. When that happens, you still may not agree with that logic, but at least you can attempt to persuade the other person now that you understand them.