Now, if you and I were to stand side by side in front of the tree in question, would we both see the same tree? We could mark out a place on the ground to stand on so that we each, in turn, could gaze at the tree until we were confident enough that we could recreate it from memory with, say, a canvass and some paint and a paintbrush. And even if our artistic talents were exactly the same, we would expect there to be some differences in the finished works. Of course, we would be more naturally inclined to attribute the differences mostly to individual experience, and not of course to some underlying fundamental biological difference given that we assumed for this example that our artistic abilities were completely matched. For the difference between dog sensibility and human sensibility, however, we can’t look beyond the biological distinctions. We know dogs use their sense of smell to navigate in a way that humans don’t, so you have one distinction there. However, since we tend to anthropomorphize dogs more than many other animals, it could help us to better fully grasp the nature of our current psychological inquiry by considering a different, non-human animal, say, a bat. Most bats use echolocation to help them carve up the world, and philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked the question “What is it like to be a bat?”, though he wasn’t the first to ask it. Can you imagine yourself riding an air current on a warm summer evening having to rely on sound waves to find your way around? An interesting question, to be sure. Another interesting question many of us already spend a lot of time thinking about is “What is it like to be human?” Moreover, we look at the question subjectively and objectively. We wonder what it’s like to be a specific other person, to walk a mile in her shoes we sometimes say. And we also think about people in general, collectively. What set of features of human experience can be subsumed under the general heading What it’s like to be human?
Let’s try something. Close your eyes and bring up in your mind the image of some scene you’re quite familiar with, however not one that would present itself immediately if you were to open your eyes again right now. For example, maybe you’re at home now, so thinking about your workplace would be suitable. Maybe it’s your family home, the house you grew up in, and, perhaps, the one in which your parents still live. In fact, this might be the perfect case. Recall your bedroom, a place in which you spent many of your waking hours each week, year after year, from your elementary school days until high school. Maybe, as soon as you left that home to embark on your own journey through adulthood, your father quickly turned that room into a study, a place for him to escape to and relax, according to a plan that must have been in place before you ever faced the reality of going out into the world without a safety net. Maybe, when you visit the family home these days, and you look in on what used to be the place where you slept and dreamed, you feel a bit sad.
Or, maybe, none of this is like your experience at all. However, the room which you spent the most time alone in, in the home where you spent the largest number of years without being uprooted, will suffice. Anyway, with eyes still closed, recall that room. You can see it vividly, can’t you? Maybe some books on a shelf up against the wall to your left. A large window in the wall straight in front of you. You almost feel as you’ve been transported back across the years. You sense the room all around you. And, within this imagining, if you close your imaginary eyes, you feel you can point to various objects in that room blind. The clock on the desk to your right, for example.
…
Now, if you shared this room with no one growing up, it’s likely that up to this point in our exercise, you haven’t brought up any images of other people in that room. And, if you try, by recalling some moment where, maybe, say, your mother, was in the room with you, the image of her seems fleeting, almost ghostlike, in comparison to how strongly you sense the room and its stationary objects. Maybe you recall your mother in your room, speaking a single sentence. So confident you are that you recall every word of that utterance, that it seems as if for a brief few seconds she’s right there in that imaginary room with you. Yet, she has no staying power in this imagining. Beyond that single sentence, you can’t recall much else she said or did in those few moments on that particular day. And, if you keep trying to remember her in that moment, it’s as if she’s on a playback loop, repeatedly making that single statement and nothing else. A ghostly apparition like a character in a science fiction movie who makes a single plea for help over and over, in the form of a holographic video display.
That your childhood bedroom, or whatever room it is in your imagining, seems to be so persistent in your mind while a single moment with your mother in that room seems so ephemeral, shouldn’t be surprising; the image of your room is one that was built up over time, an amalgamation of many experiences with a place that generally kept its most prominent features intact from one experience to the next. Experiences with your mother in that place were far less numerous than experiences of being alone there, so the latter notion, of being alone in that room, presents itself with more force in your mind. In other words, as far as your experience with that room is concerned, the act of being in the room alone itself has far more meaning for you than being in there with your mother. And, looking back at the totality of the time you spent there, the room holds a special place in your memory; one that has seemingly little to do with your mother’s existence at all.
But, aren’t we just turning probability into meaning here? If you cycle through all of your memories in that room, it’s much more likely that you’ll come across memories of you alone in that room than ones that include your mother, or any other family member or friend, so it makes sense that you feel you have a unique connection to the room, apart from other connections you feel you have, connections to other things, places, and people.…
In a stationary environment, different experiences on different days in that environment will highly resemble each other, the mental residue of experience catches you like thick, dusty cobwebs as you roam the corridors of your mind. When you open your eyes on a familiar scene, your past history with that environment is brought forth and recognition leads to understanding. And this understanding guides your interaction with the environment, it tells you how to see it, what to focus on and what to dismiss. What you feel about it, what it means to you, you’re aware of it immediately. Intuitions about what to expect, what to be careful of and what you can get away with, they hit you spontaneously.
And, when you see a tree and recognize it as such, it’s likely that you don’t stop and wonder how it was instantly recognizable at all. The basic answer, one which is intuitive to most of us, is that we bring our experience with us wherever we go, and it’s there in our minds, so that some part of it can be called up at any time according to the context of whatever situation we find ourselves in. Recognition happens all the time, yet we take it for granted and rarely give much thought to the impressive things our minds are capable of. But, how can we know the degree to which we are aware of our current surroundings and the degree to which we are just interacting with our own history with them or ones similar?
Imagine, it’s late at night, and you’ve been up doing some reading on your living room couch. But, now you’re ready to go to bed. You put the book down on the coffee table, stand up and stretch and yawn. You go around and make sure all of the doors are locked, turning off lights as you go. You pick the book back up with the intention of returning it to your study, where you’ll continue reading it tomorrow, since tomorrow is a Saturday and the living room will be occupied by your spouse and children. You make your way upstairs, and at the top of the staircase, you stop, look down the hall, and notice a thin sliver of golden light at the base of the door to your son’s room. You go to it, knock quietly, wait a few seconds, then open it. He’s sleeping, an open comic book laying on the bed next to him. You put the comic on a chair in the corner, pull the sheets up to cover him, extinguish the lamp on his nightstand, and leave the room, quietly closing the door as you do so. You make your way down the hall to your study, open the door, and see before you a man tied to a chair, his mouth covered with duct tape, his eyes bulging from their sockets locked on yours, the room behind him engulfed in flames.
Who is this man? you think. And those flames, they weren’t there earlier. In fact, I don’t recognize any of this. You wish the man good luck, close the door, and go to gather your family for a safe evacuation from the house. A half hour later, standing on the front lawn, you see your wife sign a consent form attached to a clipboard. She hands it to a police officer and they both look over at you. You look down in shame, and realize you’re still holding your book. Then the officer comes over to you, puts a hand on your elbow, and politely asks you accompany him back to his patrol car…
Of course, you don’t literally lose your mind when you enter a room, but you do lose something. A psychological study in 2011 demonstrated the reality of the so-called “Doorway Effect”, where one forgets why one came into a room after passing through its doorway. Basically, your mind creates a situational model of whatever environment you find yourself in. If you enter a room in your own house, the recognition is instantaneous; you see the room mostly in the way you’ve always seen it before. If you’re the type of person who keeps a room in good order, you instantly know where various important items are in the room without having to look for them. In fact, you could stay in your living room, close your eyes and imagine entering another room, say, your study. And, within this imagining, you could easily sense where those various important items are in that imaginary room, which represents a real room. And, if you want to check, you could go up to your study and make sure that everything important is indeed in its place. If you were to leave your living room with the purpose of returning the book you’d been reading to the study, you might find that when you got there, you’d forgotten why you came into the study at all. Then, you might look down at the book in your hand and think, Oh yes, that’s it, and then put it back into its place on the bookshelf.
Crossing the threshold into a room, you are now in an environment different than the one you were in two seconds before, and your mind creates a situational model which takes into account that your surrounding environment has changed, the situational model that was in your mind seconds ago seemingly brushed away, your reason for coming into the room brushed away with it, which seems to follow since that purpose was created within the context of a different situational model.
