Seeing the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion

How our conceptual framework lets us see new things

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It seems like a rule in developmental psychology that every paper needs to mention this William James quote:

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion

—William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)

The point of the quote is that newborns need to make sense of all of this crazy sensory data that they get. People walk around talking, but it's just weird noises. There are flashes of light, tactile sensations, smells. For the baby, all of these just occur without context.

Developmental psychologists generally use this quote as the set-up: how do babies go from this chaotic experience to a full understanding of the world? What tools do they use to build up their representation of the world? This leads to all kinds of arguments around what parts of our cognitive abilities are innate and what are learned—the nature or nurture debate that

Paul Bloom

(fitting name given the James quote) recently wrote about.

Some posit learning mechanisms, like our ability to pick up on statistical patterns in our sensory experience ("statistical learning"), as an innate framework that we use to build our concepts and understanding of the world from. But there are lots of things babies seem to innately understand—despite the widespread belief, babies don't lack object permanence, and at just a few months old they act surprised when an out of sight object seems to disappear. Babies also have an innate ability to recognize and discriminate faces—they can even differentiate monkey faces better than grown humans can (babies are weird).

Regardless, the world is in many ways confusing to babies. The level of "blooming, buzzing confusion" you think they experience might depend a bit on how much you think is innate, but there's no question that much of what's going on goes over their little baby heads.

Which raises the question: What is it like to experience the world with such an impoverished conceptual understanding?

What might it be like to experience a blooming buzzing confusion?

Take a look at the following image. If you haven't seen it before, it might not look like much of anything. That's okay, that's the point:

Image source

Make sure you look at it before scrolling down. Try to figure out what's going on in the image.

KEEP LOOKING

Gotta put another line here to move the next image down a bit further

Hopefully this is far down enough?

This image is commonly used in studies of perception (and, probably much more commonly, in psychology classrooms teaching perception). The point is to show how much our expectations about what we're looking at affect what we see.

Okay, now look at this next image.

Whoa! It's a dalmatian sniffing around close to the shade of a tree!

The funny thing is, now that you've been exposed to what the image is "about", when you look back at the original image without the outline, you'll still see the dog. And you won't be able to unsee the dog.

To make sense of the image, you needed to have the concept of what it was, otherwise it was just undifferentiated blobs. Once you have that concept in mind, it irrevocably changes the way you see the image.

This example might seem contrived—it's a weird blotchy grainy image that intentionally leaves out a lot of information. But this is actually how a lot of our sensory experience is, even if we don't realize it. We just usually have a lot of context and concepts influencing what we experience.

A very clear example of this is speech. When you listen to someone talking in a language you understand, you hear individual words. That might seem obvious—they're saying words, after all. But it's actually pretty amazing that we hear words because people don't actually pause to delineate words. Instead there's just a stream of sounds, which is easy to see if you look at the sound wave of someone speaking:

Figure from this paper.

Yet, when listening to someone, we effortlessly parse what they're saying into words. If you listen to a foreign language, you won't be able to tell where the words begin and end unless the person is speaking slowly and deliberately for you to try to learn.

So our sensory experience is filled with examples of things that we are only able to make heads or tails of because we have the conceptual structures to make sense of them—without those conceptual structures, things are just blobs or noise.

But this isn't just a matter of sensory experience. Let's take a paragraph that can be a blooming, buzzing confusion. Read it through and see how much you understand it, then I'll tell you something, and you can reread it to see if it changes your understanding:

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life. (Bransford and Johnson, 1972)

If you're like most people, the paragraph is hard to grasp. The words make sense but it's all so abstract the meaning just slips away from one sentence to another. You probably wouldn't be able to remember much of it if I asked you to try to reproduce it.

Now let me reveal the secret: The paragraph is about doing the laundry.

If you reread it now, you'll "get it" and remember more of it—the paragraph was originally used in a classic study of memory and showed participants remembered very little without being told what it was about ahead of time, but did much better once clued in to what it was about. Having that conceptual peg to hang things on changes the whole experience of reading it. And that's the point—our conceptual understanding qualitatively changes our experiences.

Expertise

This qualitative change in how we experience something isn't limited to contrived psychology experiments or language learning. Learning in a new domain almost always allows us to start seeing new things out of something that was previously a blooming, buzzing confusion.

Learning musical skills, whether learning an instrument or music theory, can help you differentiate pitches in what you're hearing. You might learn to differentiate distinct instruments, or, to take another example that I assume is common and relatable, the different types of screaming vocals used in metalcore or posthardcore punk.

It's long been noted that expert chess players are better at memorizing the placement of pieces on a chess board—but only if the pieces are placed in a way that is meaningful, that they actually might end up in a game. If the pieces are placed randomly, expert chess players are no better than non-experts at memorizing it. Chess experts can look at the position of a board and see more than just the pieces—they see the game state at a tactical level, and can use their understanding of what is happening at a higher level to recreate the placement. They're seeing something that novices can't.

These experiences aren't just us seeing the same thing in a different way. They allow us to see things we couldn't before.

If we take the time to wrap our heads around how forming expertise allows us to see things that were previously invisible to us, maybe we can appreciate all of the things we're only able to see because of some other form of expertise. The ease with which we see and navigate the world is a product of many sophisticated representations lying beneath the surface of our experience. We are all experts in our modern environment. If we step back, we might imagine what it would be like to look at the world without these concepts, and get a glimpse of the blooming, buzzing confusion.

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