Reality and Perception

We all live in a model of reality that our mind cleverly constructs. We are taught at school that the colours we are seeing are wavelengths and not the phenomena that we think we are conscious of. Even time has an illusory quality - living in the present moment takes on a different meaning if you understand that neural signalling processing is not completely instant and so the present is actually the very recent past. Why is this important in psychology? Because reality and perception are constructed in so many different ways and can be framed and reframed, distorted and skewed. Once we recognise that another’s experience is fundamentally their own, we can share in the phenomena of experience without thinking that we know exactly what a person is going through. We may have some similar experiences but we can never know if that is qualitatively exactly the same.