3.1. Perception as a Creative Act
What is the nature of seeing?
This question is not about our eyes—not entirely. Nor is it about light, or optics, or even neuroscience in the strict sense. As creatives, it is about the world as it appears to us, and more importantly, why it appears that way. Perception is not truth necessarily. It is the translation of relationship. And like any translation, it reflects the language, culture, and emotional grammar of the creative individual.
At this point in The Pursuit Paradox, we have descended into the ruins of identity, where the artistic self fractures, distorts and succumbs to its own weight. Now, in this third act—Reinvention, Neuroplasticity, and the Evolution of Self—we step into the quiet threshold where reconstruction begins. But not a return to how things were. Rather, a reassembling into something new. What fractures can be rewoven. The Kintsugi of our self‐identity. This is where perception becomes a creative process in itself.
To return from the underworld is not to resume the life you had. As the cultural theorist Joseph Campbell taught us in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, the return is not a rewind—it is a resurrection. The one who comes back is changed, because they’ve learned how to see differently. Odysseus doesn’t just reclaim Ithaca—he reclaims it with the eyes of one who’s seen death, myth, and the edges of the map. The final stage is not a victory march. It’s a reconfiguration of reality through the lens of hard‐won perception.
And then there is Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote of floating priests and ascendant daughters as if they were reported facts. His magical realism wasn’t fantasy—it was truth as seen through a different grammar. A truth that refuses to apologize for beauty or metaphor, where myth coexists with politics, and memory with invention. Márquez teaches us that what we call “reality” is often just the consensus perception of those with power—but that our imagination is sovereign.
To see the world differently is not a poetic flourish—it is a neurological and existential capacity. And in a time where identity fractures under the weight of noise and expectation, this capacity is no longer optional. It is survival. It is agency. And it is authorship.
The Illusion of Passive Perception
We are taught, almost by osmosis, that seeing is a kind of receiving. That the world arrives at the threshold of the senses, and the brain—like a film screen or a camera sensor—simply absorbs the scene. This is the myth of passive perception: that there is an objective reality out there, and we simply open our eyes to take it in. But neuroscience tells a different story. One that is far stranger—and far more creative.
In truth, the brain is a prediction engine. It does not wait for data to arrive before building the world. It guesses. It infers. It models. What we see, hear, and feel is not the world as it is, but the world as the brain expects it to be—filtered through the lens of memory, probability, and need. This isn’t philosophy. It is the premise of predictive processing, a leading theory in cognitive neuroscience. Your brain constantly generates internal models of what it thinks is about to happen based on past experience. Sensory input is then compared to those predictions, and only the error—the difference between expectation and input—is used to adjust the model. What you perceive, then, is not reality—it is the least surprising version of reality that your brain can construct.
In this way, perception is not just a reaction—it is a kind of internal storytelling. Karl Friston, who developed the Free Energy Principle, takes this further: the brain’s primary goal is to minimize surprise—to reduce the gap between expectation and reality. Surprise is metabolically expensive. Prediction is efficient. Thus, the brain becomes an organ of probability, sculpting reality according to what is most likely, most useful, and most survivable. This means that perception is deeply personal. It is formed not just by your biology, but by your biography. Every trauma, every memory, every cultural imprint contributes to your particular and unique frame of mind.
And this is where it gets radical: If perception is a creative act, then the canvas is still wet. And that means our perceived, narrated, remembered self-image—is not fixed. It is negotiable.
The Brain as a Sculptor
If our self‐perception is a story, then the brain is its author. An author that edits as it writes, rewriting characters mid‐sentence, erasing scenes while they’re still unfolding. The story of the world—of the self—is never finished. It is rendered live. This is the power, and the danger, of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. It is how we learn, adapt, recover, and survive. But plasticity is not inherently positive—it is neutral. The brain will reinforce whatever pattern is most consistent with our lived experience, regardless of whether it serves us existentially. Rumination can become as deeply wired as gratitude. Anxiety can groove itself into the neural pathways with the same persistence as musical talent. So what determines which paths get wired? Attention.
Selective attention is the brain’s spotlight. What we attend to, we amplify. What we ignore, we prune. Attention functions as a kind of sculptor’s chisel, shaping the raw marble of experience into perception. Over time, these chiseled forms become the architecture of identity. This is called experience‐dependent plasticity. Your inner world literally rewires your outer behavior. But the most fascinating aspect is that memories themselves are plastic. Each time we recall a memory, we destabilize it—opening it up for edits before it gets reconsolidated and saved again. This means we don’t remember the past—we remember our last memory of the past. Like perception, memory is not fixed; it is reconstructed in the present moment, and as such, can be reauthored.
For me personally, there is the memory of one day in particular. I was eighteen. It was raining in Hockley Valley, and I had just returned from the music conservatory where I’d been teaching a lesson to a group of younger guitarists about suspended chords. That tension of not resolving—how a note can hover between intentions—felt like my life. As I walked back to my car, my Walkman played the haunting voice of Mark Hollis: “Life’s what you make it—celebrate it, anticipate it,” and I saw the reflection of my face in the wet pavement. It looked like a stranger’s—blurred, floating, half‐formed, yet somehow connected very sharply to the music in that moment. For years, I secretly remembered that day as the moment of a profound calling—that I was destined for a career in music. But lately, I wonder. Was it also the day I began to fracture? To disappear into the story I wanted to tell about myself? Was I perceiving my fate, or writing it?
Memory is a trick of the light. But even tricks can reveal things. The way our mind blends sensory input, memory, and emotion can become a powerful creative tool. For those of us who live through art, this is invaluable. The brain, given intention and attention, becomes a medium we can shape. You are not only the sculpture. You are also the sculptor. And the sculpting studio is your life.
Perception as Selfhood
What we call the “self” is not a thing. It is a process. A rhythmic looping of memories, sensations, emotions, language, and roles that together create the illusion of consistency. There is no single location in the brain where the self lives—no control center. How does the brain unify so many separate experiences into something that feels like personality and self‐identify?
The answer, again it seems, is perception. We perceive our self the same way we perceive the world—through inference, through narrative, through expectation. The self is a story the brain stitches together based on what it remembers and what it anticipates. This individual story is formed with tools: intention, framing and language. Intention is the act of choosing what to pay attention to. This is the foundation of authorship. Philosophers sometimes call it freewill. Without intention, perception defaults to old scripts, old memories of survival patterns. But with intention, we begin to rewrite. The act of choosing is the essential act and agency of creating. Which coincidentally is a fundamental aspect of understanding quantum physics. More on that later. Framing is how we contextualize what we see. In cognitive therapy, this is called reframing. In philosophy, it is called epistemology. In art, it is composition. How we frame experience based on context changes what it means, and thus, how it affects our perception.
And then there’s, language. Language is the scaffolding of thought. As Wittgenstein argued, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” We cannot experience what we cannot describe—not fully. Our vocabulary constrains our imagination. But this also means that expanding our language expands our reality. The metaphors we use shape our emotional responses, our expectations, our sense of self. A “broken” creative suffers differently than a “transitional” one. A “failed artist” lives differently than someone thats “reinventing”. Language is cognitively essetial, and words do indeed matter.
Perhaps this is why I began to write in earnest—not to release new music, not yet—but to find the words first.
Over the last 4 years, since the Covid pandemic, I’ve travelled quite a bit more. But for the most part, to the same general area, year after year: the Cantabrian mountains and valleys. Renting a chalet and working and hiking and revisiting the same wooded areas, between the rivers Eo and Navia. I’d been telling myself it was to reconnect with my cultural roots, and to seek out an ideal retirement home. But really, it’s been for the metaphors. The trees that grow defiantly from cliffs. The moss that covers and smooths jagged rocks. The waterfall that flows without permission, indifferent to the passage of time. Everything becoming something else, quietly and without asking. On these months‐long sojourns I began describing my thoughts and expected I might be writing lyrics to a new song, or maybe it was poetry? It felt shallow, then strange, then vulnerable. I realise I’ve been rewriting my own cognitive lexicon.
Language, I’ve discovered, isn’t just communication—it’s perceptual architecture. You speak differently, you think differently. You think differently, you become something new. The philosopher becomes the poet. The artist becomes the architect. The self becomes malleable, not because it is weak, but because it is alive.
To change how we see, we often build conditions that protect that vision. Articulating thoughts into words is a way to leave clues for oneself—like meaningful phrases taped to a mirror, music playlists titled with emotional moods, unfinished songs named “Not Dead Yet But Soon”. They are reminders of our emergence. They help anchor who we might become. You are not a noun. You are a verb.
An Architect
So what happens when we change not only how we see, but the words we use to describe what we see? What are the boundaries of thought if language sets the frame? We now turn to language—not as description, but as design. Next week we dig into: The Language of the Possible.
There is no parade. No climax. The new is internal—and silent. A decision to observe differently. In the willingness to name things gently. In refusal to repeat what no longer fits. The return is architectural. And perhaps that’s the quiet truth of all reinvention: you don’t rebuild who you were—you construct who you are becoming. You no longer merely receive the world—you participate in its creation. Perception itself becomes the medium through which the future is shaped. It’s not just what you see. Its what you name it. Shape it. Live with it.