Raindrops at the Airport

Waiting to be called for boarding, I looked out the window: it was raining quite heavily. Water shone on the tarmac, punctuated by a myriad impacts of raindrops, which were forming circles of different and varying diameters, based, presumably, on the size of each individual raindrop. As far as I am aware, these are overall distributed randomly. At first sight, in any case, I could not perceive any pattern or regularity in the rapid succession of raindrops hitting the existing layer of water on this particularly flat surface.

But I tend to spend time in abstract thought, or daydreaming, or imagination, and if my surroundings make no further demands on my attention, after a while my eyes tend to unfocus. It is a common phenomenon of decreased visual accommodation, maybe particularly frequent in people with ADHD or autism. Since it often happens to me, I have learnt to pay attention to it, that is, to observe what occurs in my visual field without refocusing my gaze. In this case, what was striking was: the raindrops seemed to form a pattern. Among all the impacts, which I continued to perceive, three of them seemed to draw a triangle, that is, to fall every time in the same places, not with the largest impact but a quantitatively significant one nonetheless, at regular intervals, in such a way that isolated the shape of a triangle within the continuing multiplicity.

Still assuming that raindrops fall in a random pattern, it was then my brain which was isolating a pattern within the chaos, probably twisting reality just enough for that purpose. Human brains are quite well trained to do this: simplify a chaotic reality into shapes that can be computationally processed for practical purposes. Here, when I was paying attention, the lack of practical purpose for me in there being or not a pattern in the falling raindrops, associated with my scientific knowledge or belief that this was not the case, kept that pattern-making process below the level of my consciousness, as being unuseful: I was not seeing a pattern. With my attention diverted, indirectly considering the visual field, my brain continued its low-level processing and, by a small interstice in the synthesis of consciouness, I was able to observe it: how a pattern had appeared. This suggested that some of what I consciously perceive as patterns may be complete constructions of my perceptual and perception-processing systems, and that I may not generally be able to distinguish those from actual patterns present in the physical world. Some patterns that I see are there, some are not there.

What was even more striking: of these three, two raindrops would often fall at a very short interval from each other, and that seemed to create a movement, from one to the other, as if instead of separate raindrops falling from above, it was the impact circle that moved, along one of the sides of the triangle, at a very fast speed. I have since read something similar in the “beta phenomenon”, first identified by Wertheimer in 1912: if shown two dots in two different places in very quick succession, we will “see” the dot moving from one place to the next, including seeing it in a middle position where no dot actually ever was. In a more humorous fashion, I have a very fast dog of the whippet breed, and once a lady, after commenting on his beautiful coat, exclaimed “oh, but you have two of them!”, because Odin had run so fast in a circle behind her and back on the other side, it made more sense that there be two dogs instead of just one that ran so, so fast (mind-blowingly fast!).

In these examples, someone’s brain either creates a relation of causality where there is none, or because the actual one is “unbelievable”, imagines two beings where there is only one. Why do I say “causality” instead of “movement”? Well, one can consider movement as the most basic form of causality (departure of object from point A causes arrival of object at point B); one can also consider causality as a concept constructed from the observed phenomenon of movement (object arrives at B after departing from A and traveling for a time t). If two things happen one after the other in time, it is probably because one caused the other, we think. (Cause and effect as an artificial subset of reality.)

Patterns that are not there are not much less there than those who are. Rain drops can be perceived as forming a triangle, by a brain in a certain state, because that brain has a tendency to create causal relations out of everything, which it processes (and we perceive as “happening”) in succession (to itself, succession as defined by its own sequential way of processing input).

Because our perception presents things to us one after the other, our brain postulates relationships of cause and effect. These may be confirmed or not in later processing, but those that are not exist almost as much as those that do.