The Invisible Crowd 🏙️

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 107

Imagine you're walking through a university campus. A tourist approaches you and asks for directions. You want to help, but your answer gets interrupted by two guys carrying a door, briefly obstructing your view of the stranger. As you attempt to continue the explanation, you suddenly notice it's a different tourist you're talking to!

Or maybe you wouldn't realize the switch at all. In an experiment about "change blindness," researchers Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin showed that about 50% of people fail to notice when the person they are interacting with is replaced by a completely different person during a brief visual distraction.

Experiments like that highlight a central feature of our perception: Attention is mostly exclusion.

We are constantly surrounded by complete strangers, yet we mostly render them as insignificant. This miracle allows us to swim through the crowds of urban life without friction. Just picture unrelated groups of other animals meeting. Not only will they pay very close attention to each other, but they will also be ready to fight for their lives.

War hasn't been instilled in mankind by culture. Chimpanzee patrols can ambush and kill rivals in coordinated attacks. Recently, the world's largest known wild chimpanzee group (~200 individuals in Uganda’s Kibale National Park) split into "Western" and "Central" factions. The Western group initiated a systematic campaign against their former friends, resulting in dozens of targeted killings - civil war.

How do humans manage to live together in such huge numbers without constantly being overwhelmed by threat? Not just that, how do we render strangers as so insignificant that they can be exchanged right in front of our eyes?

To perceive anything in an infinitely complex territory, we have to exclude almost everything. That's why our conscious experience is only a tiny slice of the world. It acts as a map of what's important.

But this bright map isn't exactly a filtered version of reality. It's a prediction that's constantly compared and adjusted to incoming sensory data. Here is an example of how this can be observed in daily life:

A few weeks back, I was walking through the city, listening to music and passing other people without giving them much attention. Suddenly, the mood shifted to nervousness, and my focus was forced up and left, where a man was walking towards me. His statue, outfit, and gate matched a guy I knew, but didn't want to meet (hence subtle anxiety rather than happy excitement). I automatically glanced at the face - and it was him 😱

But only for a moment. A mere fragment of a second later, the face glitched and turned into that of a stranger. My predictions had been updated with sense data from my eyes, correcting the face to match the photons hitting my retina, and the nervousness quickly vanished.

Anil Seth calls our experience a "controlled hallucination." Hallucination because it's a predictive map, an interpretation of the reality beyond us. Controlled because it's continuously updated with sense data.

As long as there's no significant mismatch between our predictions (or rather: desires) and the incoming data, we (our attention) can freely explore the map. We are free, of course, only insofar as we manage to interrupt our automatic patterns of thought and behavior.

Things can shift instantly when a significant mismatch occurs. Suddenly, you're not where you thought you were, in a real sense. Your map has been invalidated, and your system is designed to alert you to this emergence of the unknown. In what's called the "orientation reflex," your attention is pulled towards the mythological snake in the garden.

Easy to imagine that these biological systems have originally developed to protect us from actual snakes. But evolutionarily, our environment has not just been trees and predators, but (maybe most importantly) other humans. The most significant things in life are relationships - at least as long as you're not in acute physical danger.

Evolution is fundamentally an opportunistic process of tinkering. Rather than engineering brand-new solutions from scratch, it almost always repurposes, tweaks, or expands existing features. It isn't surprising then that we navigate relationships using the same experiential tools we apply to "actual" territory like the jungle and its predators.

Sensing conflict with a friend is not just the psychological version of hearing a snake in the bush - it's the same phenomenon. But the world consists of infinite bushes, noises, and other little gaps in the map. We can only meet it by abstracting, interpreting, and observing whether our best guesses lead us to the desired land.

Attention is exclusion. Not just in the jungle, but in all environments - including the social world. As long as the people around you act out the cultural contract (behave "normally"), a low-resolution representation of them is enough to navigate. That's why in the experiment half of the participants didn't notice the switch: a tourist was replaced with a tourist - no mismatch, no orientation reflex, no need to sound the alarm.

Even if you don't notice it, your predictions are constantly inspected. If a person near you suddenly violates the social contract, for example by loudly insulting an invisible kangaroo, it would demand your attention with overwhelming force. You'd make sure they're harmless or move away. But what you're really doing is dealing with the sudden emergence of the unknown: either by mining it for data to update your map, or by fleeing somewhere known and safe.

Ask yourself: What's a snake you can currently sense in your garden?
How will you react to it?
With flight and avoidance - or with courage and curiosity?

✒️ Quote of the Week: “Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.” -Seneca

🍿 Video of the week: Our Minds Are Weirder than You Think

🎧 Song of the Week: Audiomachine - I Fear Nothing

Now I’d love to hear from you!

Did something in my writing catch your attention?
Was there an idea you found particularly intriguing?
Or is there a question that’s been on your mind related to these topics?

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

Can’t wait until next week’s edition? Check out my essays.