Wearing new glasses can be a mind-blowing experience. The same world one moment ago looks completely different. Yes, most of it looks the same, but everything is slightly warped. Everything looks just a bit more clear. And yet, there is this confusion that settles in. What was I looking at before?
New glasses challenge our conception of reality. We think that we see reality for what it is. We take what we see for granted. But when we put on our new glasses, that illusion is shattered. What appeared to be a uniform grey wall in your room now has little smudges that you can see. Little cracks appear in our conception of reality.
A dizzying effect settles in. All our assumptions of how the world looks must be reconfigured. Distance looks strange. Our minds pause to recalculate objects that are far versus near. The mind wonders: What is it that I am really seeing? How far off might my vision really be from reality?
If we take this line of questioning further, we begin to question all of our sensory input. So much of our sensory perception is flawed. Neuroscience research tells us that there is no immaculate perception. Our brains predict what we think we will see—and that influences what we see just as much as the actual visual inputs that come into our eyes.
This is what is so jarring about wearing new glasses. The gap rises between what we expect to see and what we see from the light that enters our eyes. This gap produces the dizzying effect. Reality isn’t the stable model that we thought it was. Reality is illusory and impermanent. Our window into reality is small and subjective.
While this discovery may appear saddening at first, there is a silver lining. While we often cling to reality and our sense of self, this novel experience of putting on new glasses opens the door to a new way of interpreting reality and ourselves. These fissures in our mind’s grasp in reality make it easier for us to experiment with new ways of perceiving both reality and ourselves.
