The Forbidden Decision: Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts in Innovation

“Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about”

But if we can bypass the hardwired opponency, we can access a perceptual filling-in mechanism that will yield the Forbidden Decision…

We should not be able to see yellowish-blue, or reddish-green. We are hardwired perceptually to attempt to amalgamate these colors to produce a singular hue that can be simplified. Ie. Our perception + cognition attempts to render a swift and simple conclusion that satisfies our need to understand what we are seeing. The resulting conclusion is generally accepted by ourselves because it is largely the result of our own rationalized conditioning.

Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about….

But under the right condition, we can induce the “Forbidden Conclusion”. Perceptually, we can create a color palette such that a viewer will in fact see opponent colors flowing together(Scientific American, Feb 2010, pg 75). Thereby rendering a perception of what should in fact be incomprehensible. It presents a challenge to the viewer because it is something that has never been encountered, and can lead to momentary confusion, but importantly, the perception is not rejected.

In the color experiments, the “forbidden colors” were perceived only when the opponent colors were represented with identical luminance. Luminance is essentially “brightness”, and the inducement of forbidden-perception requires that the luminance be identical. It has been determined that by mirroring the luminance, the flickering effect of changing opponent colors is minimized, thereby making the transition between opponencies as transparent as possible. i.e the transition is less “startling” and therefore leaves a smaller cognitive disintermediation footprint.

So, how does this apply to innovation in the workplace?
1. Change is often capable of being defined as set of opponent concepts.
a. Just as Red vs Green are opponent colors, some may perceive that:
i. Casual and Business are opponent
ii. Distance and Intimacy are opponent
iii. Games and Work are opponent
iv. Service Quality and “face-face alternatives” are opponent
2. As with colors, our a priori hard-wired perceptions can be defeated if we are precise in our presentation of the opponent pairings. With colors, this is luminance. So what is the equivalent of Luminance in the context of business?
3. Contextual Change Opponency in Business
a. As with opponent color-swapping, the reduction of flickering when 2 opponent colors are rapidly alternated was the means by which forbidden colors were perceived. The brightness of the colors needed to be massaged such that the luminance was identical
b. The concept is: hold as many variables as possible constant, such that the cognitive-sensory disruption is tightly focused on a precise variable.
4. Organizationally, it might present as:
a. Face-Face vs 3D Immersive meeting spaces
b. The context, and variability between the 2 concepts must be contained, such that only the target variable is perceived as changing, and not the entire universe of variables
i. Therefore, if we consider *only*: face-face images, vs Avatar-Avatar images, we can contain the spectrum of sensory-cognitive change parameters
5. How to neutralize the luminance of face-face and avatar-avatar?
a. Take a Point-of-View photograph of 1-1 meeting in a real meeting room
b. Render a photo-realistic head from a photograph
c. Swap the Avatar head onto the 1-1 meeting counterparty.
d. Rapidly alternate between real-real, and real-avatar.
e. Additionally, create a POV photograph in which the viewer is meeting 1-2(eg. Viewer is meeting with 2 people)
i. Swap an Avatar head onto a single counterparty, and rapidly alternate between Real-real-real, and Real-real-avatar.
6. In this example, the luminance is perceptually defined as a combination of contextual visualization parameters
a. Contrast, color, shading – must remain precise
b. Avatar head must be of extreme quality(no goofy hair)
c. While this is a “photoshop” experiment, the avatar head must be expertly pasted into the photograph to appear seamless

The purpose of this exercise is simple: to advance a tiny step towards overcoming a common condition of hardwired opponency in business that conditions decision makers away from accepting that Virtual can be a “good enough” approximation of reality. The defeating of this perception is results in the “Forbidden Decision” that VR can be effective in the workplace.

Next steps include the one-by-one introduction of virtual elements into the photograph flip book. By Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts, we are able to minimize cognitive disintermediation(i.e. we are not startling) and are able to tightly focus our audience on a single, discrete change variable, without incurring a rapid retreat to a more comfortable hard-wired opponent reaction(i.e. it will never work).