Navigating Perception in Couples Therapy: Understanding Emotional Realities

How Bayesian Inference and Sensory Perception Influence Relationship Dynamics

Many times in couples therapy, the therapist can feel like an arbitrator. The request to decide on which side the truth lies usually does not concern moral questions but rather factual questions. The couple seeks confirmation of their perception of reality. Is it true that the couple's daughter spoke angrily at the moment? Did I also hear now that the husband is threatening a divorce?

The answer is almost always: yes and no. The reason for this is the perception of reality. And reality is not perceived in the same way as fish are caught in a net—miserable, in its entirety, and regardless of the fisherman's expectations and predictions. In many ways, our perception is an unfolding event managed according to the principles of Bayesian inference (named after Thomas Bayes). This is a statistical inference method used extensively to analyze how a formula used to make predictions is updated when the information is dynamically updated.

Despite the explosive name, it is a very intuitive idea in the case of psychological perception and certainly of the process of decoding emotions in interpersonal interaction. The basic idea is that we have a certain prediction about what our senses perceive, and new evidence in the field is used by us to update the initial hypothesis. The updated hypothesis about the current situation can serve as a basis for our future forecast.

For example, let's imagine that we are approaching our house and see that a car is parked on the sidewalk in front of the front door. The first time we encounter this sight, we may be alarmed and assume that a criminal incident has occurred in our building. But if we enter the building and see that one of the apartments has a new tenant entering, who introduces himself as a police officer, our hypothesis about the criminal event will be updated. At some point, after we get used to seeing the new tenant's car near the house, seeing a police car on the sidewalk in front of our house will no longer instinctively alarm us and will not raise the assumption that something criminal has happened. The updated hypothesis will be that the neighbor is home.

I use this example with hesitation. While it does illustrate the forecast updating process, it is also misleading about the place and role of conscious interpretation in our perception process. That is why it is important for me to emphasize that to understand the gap that has opened up between us and our partner in our perception of reality, we need to understand that the example of the mobile phone is an example of a slow event, which gradually unfolds in reality and allows for a conscious correction of our predictions. This is in contrast to the process of interpersonal emotional communication that occurs with incredible speed when, in the vast majority of the times and stages, we are completely unaware that our mind sees what it predicts it will see. These predictions are largely influenced by our life experience up to that moment and not only by the objective information that reaches our senses at that moment.

Many examples of sensory illusions, the kind that break the Internet, demonstrate this point. At the beginning of June, millions of surfers listened to an unclear audio segment. At the same time as the audio segment, they could read one of nine different sentences such as "Rotating pirate ship" or "That is embarrassing." The fact that made this clip viral is that for most people, the sentence they were reading at that moment dramatically affected how their brains perceived the audio clip they were playing. What was an unclear combination of sound signals became a clear message in their minds once it was joined by visual/textual information.

All of this is, of course, very relevant to your fight with your partner regarding the way he warned your child to clear the table. It is reflected in the moment in the clinic when you point to your partner and ask the therapist, "Did she raise her voice now?!" This is because the example of the "rotating pirate ship" illustrates how something can be two different things. If my brain can hear "a pirate ship spinning" in one context, and as soon as the context changes a little, the brain can hear the words "it's embarrassing" in the same combination of sounds, then surely my brain and the other person's brain can hear something else in the same combination of sounds. All that is required to understand this is to remember that the context in which I experience reality is always different from the full context in which the other person experiences reality.

In the case of the audio illusion, it is easy for us to put our finger on the difference in the context: the sentence we are reading. But such differences in context exist all the time because the context is based on our life experience so far. And our life experience so far is quite different from our partner's life experience. And not only that, but our life experience is not labeled in the brain and is formed into predictions in a way that gives more weight to the most recent events. Instead, when the brain makes its predictions, it gives a higher weight to the predictions that have been realized the most times (and this is without taking into account the possibility that the brain gives too much weight to the predictions that were realized at the beginning of its existence because, as a system, the brain is more easily influenced at the beginning of its formation).

We will take this into account now and return to our example from the beginning. If I grew up with a mother who, every time she raised her voice, it meant she was angry with me and that I would soon be punished, then as soon as the volume of my partner's voice increases, my brain instantly synthesizes this sensory information along with the predictions that have proven themselves the most times and produces the following output: The woman in front of you is angry. This output is not experienced as an interpretation. The feeling "she is angry" is not an interpretation in two different senses, which partially overlap: 1. The feeling is immediate, that is, phenomenologically speaking, it is not a serial experience in which the sound signals are first perceived, then the signal is measured in comparison to a huge database in my brain, and then received The result: she is angry. 2. The feeling is of "fact" and not of interpretation.

To understand this, you can think, for example, about what happens in our brain when we walk past a bakery and smell borax or another salty pastry. The perception that comes to mind is: "Yummy, borax." That is, our brain knows for sure that it is a salty pastry. But how does it know that? After all, it was only exposed to scent signals. We didn't put anything in here. In practice, the information that reached our minds only came through the nose. Despite this, the experience is a definite feeling that this is a salty pastry. This is because enough times in the past, whenever we tasted a pastry that had this particular smell, it also tasted salty. These neurons have become accustomed to firing together. Now, once the smell neurons fire, enough of the taste neurons fire. A sufficient amount of this combined activity occurs in our brains to produce the output: a yummy, savory pastry.

Just as quickly and naturally, when the couple raises their voice, my brain can produce the output: she is angry with me. The possibility that she might not be angry but afraid or offended is not represented in the initial projection of my thrifty brain, just as there is no representation in my sensory perception of the possibility that the smell of the borax comes from food that tastes like sushi. Theoretically, it might happen, but the mind is lazy, and it doesn't allocate much real estate to predictions that haven't proven to be useful.

How do you get out of it? We return to the Bayesian update process. In therapy, we introduce new information to the brain through several channels: First, we begin to understand intellectually that there is a gap between our experience and the events that occur in reality, and that the difference between our experience and the experience of our partner is not a "New Age" matter of giving respect to the experience of each one of us, but a biological fact. Second, and more importantly, we are working to produce new experiences that will allow the brain to update its predictions, in a way that in the future will allow a person to hear their partner raise their voice and immediately experience her distress and respond accordingly.