What happens when you stop trusting what you see?

How much of the world are you actually experiencing, and how much are you simply assuming?

I once read that we don't really see the world around us. We see the version of it that our brains have constructed.

That sounds like the sort of sentence that belongs on a motivational poster in a therapist's waiting room, but the more you think about it, the more unsettling it becomes.

Look around you now. Pick something ordinary. A mug. A window. A tree outside. Your computer screen. You probably aren't consciously thinking about what you're seeing. You aren't analysing every line, shadow, colour and texture. Your brain is doing most of the work for you, turning an enormous amount of incoming information into something that feels simple and obvious.

There's a reason for that. If we had to consciously process every tiny detail of everything around us, we'd probably never get out of bed (though somedays that would be nice).

Instead, our brains make shortcuts and those shortcuts are incredibly useful. But they're also capable of being spectacularly wrong.

We don't see everything

Imagine walking through a busy town centre. People are talking, cars are moving, signs are flashing, music is coming from somewhere to your left, and someone is eating something that smells strongly of onions.

You aren't consciously processing all of that. Your attention is selecting some things and ignoring others. If you're looking for a particular shop, the name of the shop suddenly seems to appear everywhere. If you're worried about being late, the traffic lights become enormously important. If you're hungry, you start noticing restaurants you would normally walk straight past.

The environment hasn't changed. You have. Your brain has decided what matters and what doesn't.

This is one of the things I find fascinating about perception. We tend to imagine that there is a world "out there" and that our senses simply provide us with a faithful picture of it.

But perception isn't a camera. It's more like an ongoing negotiation between what is coming in and what the brain expects to find. And that raises an uncomfortable question.

How often do we experience something because it is actually there, and how often do we experience it because our brains were already prepared to find it?

The power of expectation

If somebody tells you that a person is unfriendly, you may notice their lack of eye contact. If you're told they're shy, you might interpret exactly the same behaviour differently. If someone tells you a restaurant is terrible, you may notice the slow service and forget the perfectly good meal.

The facts haven't necessarily changed. But the story you've built around them has, and once that story exists, it can become surprisingly difficult to see beyond it.

Try this with yourself

Here's an experiment you can do without buying anything, downloading an app or standing on one leg.

Pick something you have a strong opinion about. It could be a person. A place. A political idea. A hobby. A book. A particular type of food. A decision you've made. Something you are convinced you understand.

Now ask yourself a slightly irritating question:

What would I have to notice for me to change my mind?

Not "What evidence would prove I'm right?" What would make you reconsider?

That's a very different question.

We’re generally pretty good at collecting evidence that supports what we already believe. We notice the thing that confirms our opinion and dismiss the thing that doesn't, often labelled as confirmation bias. We remember the conversation that proved our point and forget the three conversations that didn't.

That's not because we're being deliberately dishonest. Our brains are trying to make sense of the world efficiently.

The trouble starts when efficiency becomes certainty.

The strange comfort of being right

Lets face it, being certain feels good. There's something deeply satisfying about putting a complicated subject into a neat little box and sticking a label on it.

Good. Bad. Safe. Dangerous. Clever. Stupid. Friend. Enemy. Success. Failure.

Once something has a label, we don't have to think about it quite so hard.

And I suspect this is one reason we sometimes resist challenging our own perceptions. Changing your mind isn't just about changing an opinion. Sometimes it means admitting that the version of events you've been carrying around in your head wasn't quite accurate.

That can be uncomfortable. Perhaps you judged somebody unfairly and you misunderstood what they meant. Or maybe what you thought you knew wasn't true.

There’s a particular kind of discomfort that comes from discovering that the person who has been misleading you might have been yourself.

What if your memory isn't telling the truth?

Memory makes this even more interesting (and I’m including air quotes around the word interesting).

Most of us experience memories as though they are recordings. Something happened, we stored it away, and later we play it back. But memory is not a video archive.

Every time we remember something, we reconstruct it. Details can be altered, lost or influenced by what we’ve learned since the event. Other people's versions of what happened can become mixed into our own and the emotional meaning of an event can change even when the basic facts remain the same.

That doesn't mean your memories are worthless. It means they are human. It also means that two people can remember the same event differently while both genuinely believing they are remembering it accurately.

That’s a rather unsettling thought when you start applying it to your own life. How many arguments have begun with two people saying, "That's not what happened"? And what if, in some small way, both of them are right?

Then there are the things you never noticed

There's another problem with perception that I find even more interesting. Sometimes we don't remember something incorrectly, we never noticed it in the first place.

You can walk down the same street a hundred times without really seeing it. Then one day somebody points out a particular building, a carved stone above a doorway or an unusual tree growing through a wall, and suddenly it seems impossible that you never noticed it before.

It was there all along. Your eyes were receiving the information. Your brain simply didn't consider it important enough to bring into your conscious attention.

This happens to me quite a lot. I'll be walking somewhere I've been before and suddenly notice something that must have been there for years. A particular shape in a tree or the way an old wall has been repaired.

Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it, and that’s one of the most useful things we can do to challenge our own perception.

Look again.

Not because the world has changed, but because you might have.

The dangerous bit

Here's where I think this becomes more than an interesting psychological curiosity.

If our perception can be influenced by expectation, attention, memory and assumption, then we have to accept that our experience of the world isn’t completely objective.

None of us gets to step outside our own heads and look at reality from nowhere. We carry our history with us.

We carry our fears, experiences, expectations and prejudices. We carry assumptions about how people behave, how the world works, and the stories about ourselves that may have been true once but have quietly become outdated.

And those stories influence what we notice. If you believe you're bad at something, you'll probably notice the mistakes. If you believe you're unpopular, you'll notice the person who doesn't say hello.

Meanwhile, evidence that contradicts the story may pass almost unnoticed.

So try breaking the pattern

The next time you're absolutely certain about something, pause for a moment. Not forever. You don't need to become one of those people who responds to every simple question with, "Well, it depends."

Just pause.

Ask yourself:

• what am I assuming?

• What have I failed to notice?

• Is there another explanation?

• what evidence would genuinely change my mind?

And perhaps most importantly, ask whether you're looking at what is actually happening or simply looking for evidence that supports the story you've already created.

You might discover that your original perception was perfectly reasonable but you also might discover that you were wrong.

And that's where stories come from

I think this is one of the reasons I'm so interested in perception when I'm writing. A thriller becomes much more interesting when the question isn't simply, "What happened?" but "What does the character think happened?" Those two things aren't necessarily the same, and the gap between them can be a very interesting place to put a story.

That gap was the starting point for The Archive of Ashes. I began wondering what might happen if you could challenge your own perception so completely that you were no longer sure which version of your life was the real one.

Once you start questioning perception, you can no longer be completely sure which parts of the story belong to the world and which parts belong to the person experiencing it. That is a wonderfully dangerous place for a writer to start, because every time you think you've worked out what’s happening, you can turn the question around and ask whether you've simply made the same assumptions as the character.

That's where The Archive of Ashes began for me. Not with a plot, or a character, or even a particularly clever twist, but with a nagging feeling that our perception of ourselves might be far less reliable than we like to believe and what happens when the stories we tell begin to overlap.

And sometimes, if you're a writer, that one small shift in perception is all it takes to start an entirely different story.

Explore The Archive of Ashes