Hoffman’s key concept in this chapter is that we construct our perception of the world around us, and that because perception is a construction - it can be re-constructed through stimulus, virtual reality, mimicry - by taking advantage of the ways in which we sense and then composite a picture of the world.
This chapter is a mostly a quick spin through work being done on perception, cognition and neural plasticity by people like VS Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks and others - but the original contributions/ideas by Hoffman are, in my opinion, a little flimsy - even for a book written in 1998.
I think Hoffman is oversimplifying and overstating the “you construct what you feel” concept, and I think this loss of nuance/moderation is driven by his own interest in re-constructing physicality in virtual systems; products, technology.
Yes, how we perceive the world is a complex agglomeration of embodied information from many sources. Different areas of our brain negotiate with eachother to composite what we take to be reality, but my take on this is that the simplistic mappings of stimulus to response we had in the past were insufficient. We over-estimated the fidelity with which we perceive the world.
We expected that when we stimulated Finger X with a force of Y, Region X in the brain would light up to Y degrees. It turns out to be less clear cut than that, less definite. I think his simplification of this new appreciation for the way we perceive the world down to feeling = construction is unhelpful .
If you’re interested in digging deeper into this stuff I highly recommend V.S. Ramachandran’s book Phantoms in the Brain, it’s one of my favourite books. He also gave a the Reith Lectures in 2003, and there are recordings available on the BBC website. Everything Oliver Sacks has ever written is pure gold.
(Go to the source. Meta-scholarship is usually just simplification to suit a desired outcome.)
