Is the adult world less vivid?
At some point in my adult life, I came to think that the world seemed less vivid, less real, less alive than when I was a child. For a long time, I wondered whether this was really the case or whether it was a form of nostalgia, and what it might be due to.
Recently, I read some interesting papers on the loss of vividness/depth of the world in depressed people within the framework of active inference, and I got the impression that it could be used to explain a less vivid world in (non-depressed) adults.
In this AstralCodexTen post, research is mentioned that seems to indicate that when depressed people say they “see in black and white”, this is literally the case; their visual, tactile, odor perception is literally dulled. And this would be explained by depressed people having less precision in the lower layers of the hierarchical model (those dealing with low-level sensory processing) and more in the upper layers (those dealing with the more abstract, schematized and compressed stuff).
In this paper (which I discussed here), the author argues that depersonalization/depression is due to the system ceasing to perceive itself as an effective cause of sensation, a systemic decrease in precision on policies, a loss of affect (which tunes the organism to opportunities), etc. The reason why people with depression/depersonalization report “seeing the world flat/in 2D” would be because everything ceases to be “motivationally salient”; the environment loses its depth of “affordances” (see enactivism).
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So we have two things that make the world of depressed people less vivid: less precision at the lower layers of the hierarchy, and the loss of affordance depth/richness.
My impression is that the loss of precision on the lower layers and the loss of affordance richness is something that applies very well, not only to depressed people, but, to a lesser extent, to the passage to adulthood.
Children's models are still undeveloped and unstable, and they need to pay close attention to the world in order to refine them.
Adults have developed and stable models, and can rely on their upper layers to navigate through a schematized and filtered world, and paying attention to the smallest details is a waste of resources (“I already know what it is, I don't need to pay attention to it”).
Children live in a world to be discovered, full of learning potential; adults live in a known world to “use”.
Children play with objects, manipulate them, touch everything. They're curious, they explore; they engage with the world. This translates into a richness of affordances.
The adult engages less with the world, has a goal (going to work) and walks down the street with his head straight ahead and his hands in his pockets. The system doesn't activate a rich tree of potential interactions with objects.
The child lives playfully in an experimental world, the adult lives efficiently in an instrumental world.
In my opinion, the passage to adulthood leads to a loss of the vividness/depth of the world similar, but attenuated, to that of depression.
How do you counter this? I don't know, maybe with meditation, artistic practices, games, de-automatization, etc.
But I think the most powerful, almost cheated method, to make the world more vivid is boredom. Lock yourself in a room without any “ultra-stimulating things” (electronic devices, books, people, etc.) and observe how the room slowly becomes more and more vivid. It's astonishing. I think the reason is that the brain starts looking for something to do, so attention naturally shifts “outward”, and everything starts to take on “action potential” because we're looking for something to do.