As readers know, The Design Matrix is neither anti-science nor anti-evolution. What is does represent is a challenge to the non-teleological perspective of biology and evolution. And it is not a challenge in the sense that I try to refute the non-teleological perspective, but that it lays out a positive, potentially fruitful teleological perspective of biology and evolution that embraces random variation and natural selection. What this portends is that a non-teleological perspective is not needed.

Chapter 6 (Ducks and Rabbits) plays a pivotal role in this story and recent research continues to emphasize that theme.

A new paper was published that shows that the act of envisioning reality with our minds shapes what our eyes see.

To test how imagery affects perception, Pearson, Tong and co-author Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney had subjects imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes, which are strongly represented in the primary visual areas of the brain. They then presented a green horizontal grated pattern to one eye and a red vertical grated pattern to the other to induce what is called binocular rivalry. During binocular rivalry, an individual will often alternately perceive each stimulus, with the images appearing to switch back and forth before their eyes. The subjects generally reported they had seen the image they had been imagining, proving the researcher’s hypothesis that imagery would influence the binocular rivalry battle.

Additional experiments found that the effect of imagery on perception was approximately the same as showing the research subject a faint representation of one of the patterns between trials. Stronger shifts in perception were found if subjects either viewed or imagined a particular pattern for longer periods of time. They found that both imagery and perception can lead to a build-up of a “perceptual trace” that influences subsequent perception.

This too echoes The Design Matrix:

The findings may also help settle a longstanding debate in the research community over whether mental imagery is visual—that one imagines something just as one sees it—or more abstract.

“More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there,” Pearson said. “So there’s more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing. Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see.”

We tend to see what we expect to see because this is how our brains work. And remember that both the teleological and non-teleological perspective are just that – perspectives. If one’s brain has been trained to view data from a non-teleological perspective and expectation, this mindset itself becomes a powerful “perceptual trace” and would allow one to assign non-teleological significance to data that may in reality stem from a teleological cause.