During the recent COVID epidemic, as have many others in a vulnerable (i.e., old) population, we stopped spending time indoors in public places and ordered all necessities to be delivered. From how recently an order was made or a notification from the delivery service, we had a good idea of what would be delivered and when, so when a knock on the front door came, we knew what item(s) would land on our front porch and which service would deliver it. When that knock came, my brain created a vision of an Amazon or UPS driver dropping a package on the porch. I did not have to open the door to “see,” I created the vision from repeated experience with deliveries. Not only did the knock on the door disturb my brain to create the sound of the knock, it also disturbed my brain to create the vision of the delivery. The knock was a disturbance—a perturbation—that my brain, from memory, turned into both the knock on the door and the image of the delivery.

What I find weird is not that I see the delivery without my eyes, but that I don’t find that weird. I don’t find it weird that I see without direct input to my eyes but with only the calculations of my brain.

Delight

Marie Kondo segued from Japanese housewife to the first celebrity home-decluttering consultant—even scoring a show on Netflix. She created a novel approach to deal with major and minor versions of the modern disease of packrat mania. Kondo eschews the common declutter mindset, which is either to throw or to give stuff away or, paradoxically, buy more stuff to organize your stuff. Instead of deciding what to get rid of, Kondo’s technique directs you to a strategy of what to keep. Her book or personal consultation guides you to pile your stuff (one category at a time) and keep what “sparks delight.”

Declutter our senses

In 1959, Chilean neurobiologist Humberto Maturana and friends published the results of his experiments done in Jerome Lettvin ’s MIT lab, where Maturana was a visiting scholar: What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.

Maturana found a Marie Kondo in our nervous system: decluttering the frog’s sensory signals sparks delight for evolutionary advantages. The frog’s retina detects only motion and variance in illumination, a pattern of signals that aid in the survival of the species—food acquisition, predator avoidance, and reproductive opportunity (#AmphibianMaleGaze).

“The map is not the territory.” —Alfred Korzybski

“The map is the territory.” —Heinz von Forester

The dominant model in modern cognitive theory, information processing, proposes that we take information through our senses, and our brain computes it, transforms it into symbols, and responds. The response can be short-term, ouch! hot stove, or longer term: hot stoves hurt; don’t touch them!

The information processing model can be summed in Korzybski’s famous statement above: the frog’s vision detects the change in light and movement as created by possible prey, possible predators, and possible mates. According to the information processing model, the frog’s brain is creating a map from the sensory input from the real world, which can be summarized as the map is not the territory.

But according to Maturana, the frog’s brain is creating a map, not from the real world but from the retina’s result of filtering out unnecessary (for survival) input. The map the frog’s brain is making is a map of the map already supplied by the retina cartographer. By the time the interpretation gets to the frog’s brain, there’s no direct information from the external world. To the frog’s brain, there is no external world, only a map of the map, which can be summarized as the map is the territory.

From the initial research on frog vision, Maturana (joined by student-turned–colleague neurobiologist and mathematician Francisco Varela), developed a concept of cognition based on evolutionary biology rather than the (computer-derived metaphor) information processing model. Maturana developed a hypothesis that the frog’s brain was not processing sensory input but was responding to disturbances to the senses—perturbations. That is, the nervous system has no input from the outside, but is only perturbated. To repeat: the frog’s brain is not processing information; its vision is created by updating its neural system, just as mine was when I heard the sound of the truck and the knock on the door.