Letter: Now you see it

From Peter Reynolds

Ben Haller dismisses as “silly and vacuous” the assertion that up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal (30 October, p 31). It is not.

Haller bases his criticism on his own assertion that “every second, I probably process more raw visual percepts than the number of words that go through my mind in an hour”. Whether these “raw visual percepts” amount to mental experiences is open to question.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has demonstrated that we are only ever conscious of a very small proportion of any visual field. We switch off our background consciousness of the bigger picture and are only aware of that upon which we focus attention. Of this very small amount we only actually “see” components such as edges. We add the notion of colour, for example, as labels to the data we receive: it does not exist anywhere in nature.

I suggest that we do this labelling through an essentially linguistic process.

Runcorn, Cheshire, UK