One of the weirdest bits of cognitive dissonance I’ve had in my life is when searching for an object that was easily within my field of view, but it was literally invisible to me. Whether my keys, the remote, or whatever, the more familiar I was with the object, the more completely it seems to be able to vanish. Inevitably someone else would come look for it, find it right in front of me and ask “did you even look?!”
And once it was found, I would roll back my memory and sure enough, it was there the entire time. After a brief period of self-loathing over how I could have possibly missed it, I’d invariably launch into a “whoa that’s so weird” moment until the next squirrel ran by.
One of the techniques I adapted to deal with this phenomena was to imagine the item I was looking for as either having different properties (like imagining a partner’s keys if I was looking for my keys) or as something else entirely (imagining the keys as a shoe). As long as I’m not bone tired and actually in “the moment” enough to make the adjustment, this is a really effective way to cut down on the aimless searching.
But (and to finally get to the point)… WHY does this happen?
So remember that our brains have cognitive systems that run against each other. One “adds” to your cognitive stream, the other “subtracts” from the cognitive stream. This isn’t accurate at all, but for the sake of research let’s say our “additive” stream runs over the “dorsal attention network (DAN)” and our subtractive stream runs over the “ventral attention network (RYAN)”.
If an object of focus in our “DAN” is pushed through our ponto-cerebellar processing areas, it becomes “highlighted” and our colliculi lock on like a pair of magnets snapping together. But when the object of focus is in our “RYAN” the opposite actually occurs, the ventral system *avoids* locking on that particular pattern of stimuli.
Ahhh! But why doesn’t it always happen, or why don’t the streams balance each other out and negate the bias toward the object?
So, it depends on the context we are doing the searching in. The ventral stream is our “prediction” or “context” stream, and if we are looking for an object because we need it to do something else, we actually bias it toward “disappearing”. The more intense the “something else”, the more strongly the ventral bias, and thus, the more completely it “disappears”.
We can reset this by either removing the object pattern from our attention (imagining it as something else) or by resetting our focus (taking a deep breath and focusing on the object instead of the what next). I’m sure there’s other ways to do this, but you know I’m not a writing Machine. Hah. Hah.
So this effect is really important when we think of our perception as a whole, whether it’s someone in the midst of a hallucination or just day to day looking for a remote. When we are having a “negative” hallucination the mechanic of this is a ventral stream lock, it’s intentionally “removing” objects from the stream, and the rest of the brain is stuffing the stream with whatever information seems like it will fit (which is usually a predictive concept).
For example, when looking for the remote, our predictive concept is “I want to watch (x)…” When in the throes of a negative hallucination, there’s an overarching fear that’s being injected, and the predictive concept is “I want to avoid (x)…”. But because it’s stuck in the predictive streams, the object which would verify to our brains that (x) isn’t occurring right now is “deleted”, leaving us with the thing we want to avoid.
A lot of therapy systems and psychiatric drugs attempt to induce this stream rebalancing, the therapist will remind you to “be in the now” or “focus/count a set of things in your immediate environment” or some such, while the psychiatric drugs attempt to nuke your attention streams altogether.
This mechanics of all this however are exactly the same as those the cerebellum uses to delete things like your breathing from your cognitive stream.
tl;dr Perception issues are usually an artifact of objects being overweight in the “wrong” valence stream. To correct, we need to pop it from one stream to the other.
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