How solid is perceived reality for the average person?
April 16, 2013 1:51 PM   Subscribe

I know that the brain filters things and adds symbolic meaning which makes our perception of reality uniquely subjective, but still I grew up believing that others were seeing more or less the same things I was seeing, which was a fair representation of objective reality. Now I'm starting to question that and wondering what 'normal' is.

Two people close to me have recently described their own realities to be very different to my own in ways that sound vaguely hallucinatory. Examples are perceiving emotional emanations coming from objects or designs; perceiving when someone is more or less emotionally 'present' and having that register as a physical distortion in perception, i.e. they actually look 40 ft away or 4 ft away (though not quite literally, it is evidently more complex than that); feeling spiritual presences, ghosts, welcoming or foreboding feelings from places (especially natural places); objects having a shimmering animated presence; people having a perceivable emotional state (an aura, if you like).

I consider myself a scientist and I do not believe that objects really do give off emotional signals, or that spirits and ghosts are real. However, I am convinced that these people are accurately describing the reality that they perceive. (One of these people has strong synaesthesia, which might help you believe that this is true.) Both describe it as tapping in to a layer of intuitive information which is there alongside the normal sights, sounds, etc that others such as myself can perceive. Both these people are very perceptive at reading people's emotions, so I expect they are actually tuned in to things at a very sensitive level. But it also seems their minds tend to insert extra things into the reality they perceive. (I guess everyone's mind does that including mine, but not to the same degree.)

Such descriptions of reality have been confusing to me but it seems to fit very well with huge parts of our culture, art, spiritual practice, etc. The world is full of people who claim to feel energies and see auras and such. I used to assume all such people were either fakers or had somehow deluded themselves. Now I think that such people are actually perceiving things that I'm not, and derive personal value from such perception, even if it is entirely subjective. I've also had a few intense experiences in which I have felt this kind of perception, and there are many accounts of people who tap into this on hallucinogenic drugs. But now what I'm curious about is what people see in the day to day. One of these people has told me that this intuitive way of perceiving reality is much more common than I think.

Is reality enchanted for most people, or some, or only very few? Is the physical world solid for most as I thought, or is it fluid?
posted by PercussivePaul to Science & Nature (29 answers total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Your question reminded me of a painting I saw in college. A man, a woman and a boy have their back to the viewer and all three are looking at a skyline. But it's actually a tryptic, and in each view, you see it from the perspective of each viewer. In each one, the color is different, the size of the buildings and their spacing from each other is different and if I remember, some of the shapes don't even match. I wish I could remember the artist because every time I think of subjective v objective reality, I think of this painting. It's not an answer, but hopefully a useful example.
posted by CollectiveMind at 1:57 PM on April 16, 2013 [6 favorites]


I would be inclined to think your friends had vivid imaginations, and think they're feeling emotional emanations.

If someone actually sees auras, then I would consider that a rare visual hallucination -- as rare as, say, perceiving numbers to have color. But there are lots of people who "feel" auras, and I'm inclined to think they are projecting.
posted by musofire at 1:58 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


You are equating solid with "like I see it" and fluid with "adding stuff I don't see." One could just as easily equate solid with what you call fluid and "hollow" or "colorless" with what you call solid.

I agree that what you're describing is weird, but the notion of an objective reality that some of us are closer to than others in terms of perception than others is also super weird once you start trying to figure out what that means. (Spend an afternoon flipping back and forth between the introduction to the B edition of Kant's 1st Critique and a reference guide to said introduction. You will be mesmerized. (Patricia Kitcher's introduction to the Hackett edition is stellar.))
posted by pdq at 2:01 PM on April 16, 2013


I consider myself a very rational person. I do NOT believe in souls, spirituality, auras, ghosts, etc.

I have experienced when things appear "further" away than they actually are, mostly when I have zoned out (as opposed to the other thing/person being not present). For example, if somebody is obviously angry at me, I will distance myself, and I will perceive the person as "far away" even though I know they're not. (It's a bit hard to describe.)

Another interesting thing I was reading about is colors. People are taught colors, and different colors have different names in different languages. But specifically, if two colors are differentiated in one language but not the other (e.g. turquoise vs green) the speaker of one language will be able to consistently name the colors, and the speaker of the other language will not be able to consistently name the colors unless they are presented for side by side comparison.

I have also had auditory hallucinations, but mostly when I miss home a lot. I've heard people call my name (in locations where I do not speak the language). But I have never had a visual hallucination.

The last thing I would bring up is that you can induce false memories, and there was a study that therapists accidentally (and then on purpose) did this to abuse "victims." So it's possible that your friends are retroactively including their "other" senses' perceptions into their memory, rather than having perceived the auras (or whatever) at the time the event took place. (I put other in quotes because I think they're actually subconscious intuitions.)
posted by ethidda at 2:03 PM on April 16, 2013


Perception is a very fluid thing. Think about something like color. You think green is green. Yet I, who have a very discering eye for color will see 16 gradations of that same color you call green. I'll see everything from olive drab to kelly green.

Husbunny is color-blind, he can't see green at all. His perception is different.

I've had experiences and feelings that I can only ascribe to the supernatural. People who pray will tell you that they feel the presence of a higher being when they do so.

You may be right, there may not be all those extra layers of beings, or you could just not be seeing and feeling it because you're closed off to it.

It's all very philosophical, but I suspect that when brain imaging becomes really advanced, we're going to be blown away by what it reveals.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 2:10 PM on April 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


I think reality is pretty solid for the average person. Indeed, we like to call it consensus reality precisely because you can establish most aspects pretty indisputably by just asking enough people what they perceive.
posted by themel at 2:11 PM on April 16, 2013 [3 favorites]


My oldest son has a long list of brain differences. He has auditory processing problems, partial color-blindness, probably partial face blindness, gets synesthesia when sufficiently stressed, etc. I frequently talk to him about how differently we perceive the world. Plus I was extremely ill at one time, in constant excruciating pain and on a lot of medication. I was also feverish and insomniac. Drugs, fever and lack of sleep are common factors for promoting "spirit visions" and the like. During that time, I routinely hallucinated wordless conversations with The Grim Reaper. At some point, he pointedly left, never to return. When he pointedly left, I knew the death watch was over. I knew I would live.

I don't feel a compelling need to decide whether The Grim Reaper was "real" or just a figment of my very stressed brain. His departure was meaningful information about my life. I don't see any reason why he can't be both some "spirit" (or alien intelligence) and some symbol from my subconscious.

I think my illness and all the medication I took permanently altered my perception of some things. So I think some of these perceptions you talk about are very real, they are just tapping into channels your brain doesn't have for some physical reason. I am very emotionally and socially oriented. A lot of that stuff seems more "real" to me than the physical world, which we shape in tangible terms every single day because of our mental models and social stuff and so on. Changing a person's mind can take decades or can be impossible. Changing the landscape (or whatever) happens all the time by people planting gardens, building houses, etc. So I perceive certain mental/emotional/social patterns as far more intractable and resistent to change than the physical world.
posted by Michele in California at 2:26 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Part of the problem with answering this question is that you seem to be talking about past events, and peoples' memories of past events, and your memory of those events, and your memory of their description, and their ability to describe what they are experiencing in a way that you are capable of understanding, and all of those things are notoriously complex and unreliable. And this is before we even get to the event or experience or object in question.

So you and someone who is more "spiritual" than you might have a nearly identical subjective experiences, and have such a disparate frame of reference and language for those experiences that you describe them in ways that make them seem totally divergent, even though they're not- (Milan Kudandera talk about this much better than I can in his book Unbearable Lightness of Being) or vice versa.

So, unless you want to talk about incredibly basic things like historical and numerical facts, it is basically impossible to answer this question.
posted by windykites at 2:35 PM on April 16, 2013


Long ago, after having a rather in-depth argument with a good friend over whether a particular color was red, orange, or yellow, I realized that we don't all experience/perceive the world uniformly.

And, I've seen ghosts. So, there's that, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:43 PM on April 16, 2013


The type of ecstatic experiences you describe are well-documented in epilepsy, which suggests they're not always imaginary or faked. Seems plausible that "normal" people may sometimes have these experiences too.
posted by Wordwoman at 2:52 PM on April 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


All we have to define reality are our senses, right? Yes, we have instruments to measure certain phenomena but not all of them. (Go back a 150 years and try to explain radiation. It's ok, I'll wait...)

I used to wonder if other people see colors the same way I do but how would I be able to tell if we use the same label? You may see brown, I may see blue, but if we have consistent labels for that color, who's to know that we are registering different hues?

Then there's the whole quantum thing and whether or not "reality" exists outside of our immediate perception. Or however that theory goes. (If reality is created only when I sense/think it, I would really love to learn how to quantumly sense & create a new jet.)

What I'm saying is, ghosts or not, the reality for others may actually be different from yours or mine.
posted by trinity8-director at 2:55 PM on April 16, 2013


There's an interesting FPP on how you see yourself versus how others see you. Obviously, it's an ad, but it's still an interesting point about what you focus on versus what other people focus on. Then there's things like eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable, and the various manufactured memory episodes we've seen.

However, the mistake I think you're making is you're confusing perception and interpretation, and that's where things can differ dramatically.

For example, let's say I'm having a hard time financially and stumble on a $20 on the street. Everyone would see a $20 on the street. But some would interpret it as a gift from god or an angel looking over them. Some would interpret it as luck. Some would interpret it as the universe mocking them because that's more money than they have in their bank account.

Or to put it more concretely, I grew up with dogs and my wife did not. If a big, unknown dog walks up to me with his tail wagging and a generally genial expression (not baring his teeth or growling), my interpretation will be "DOGGY! WHOZAGOOBOY? WHOZAGOOBOY?" and "This dog must be friendly." My wife's interpretation will be "Oh god there is a strange animal in front of me what does it want and how do I get it to go away?!" In both cases, objective reality is the same--dog--but our subjective and emotional experiences will be completely different and, ironically, it's possible we're both wrong in our interpretation of the dog's actions (maybe I just had a roast beef sandwich and the dog smells food, I dunno).

So, for example, your friend reading "auras" may just be better clued into emotional signals and microgestures while you are not, the way I intuitively know the difference between "dog what bites" and "dog what wants to be petted." Or there's things like sleep paralysis where people see crazy shit like shadow people or aliens or the old hag, etc. at the end of their bed/hovering over them/whatever. And it can feel very real and terrifying. And then you get into things like hallucinogenics. When this writer meets God during a trip, it's easy to write it off as drugs and atmosphere...but that doesn't make it any less real in their experience. It doesn't change the emotional response even if you write it off to neurotransmitters, you know?

There's a lot out there that is unexplained and I think part of the problem with the way people see science and logic is that it doesn't provide a satisfying answer (or any answer) and people want the world around them to make sense.

For example, when I was a kid, my mom opened the door to frantic knocking and found my grandmother standing there in her nightclothes. My grandmother (who hadn't seen me in a week) said she felt a little ridiculous, but she had a dream that I was really sick and needed to get to the ER. My mom laughed and brought her back to my room to show her I was fine, whereupon they discovered I was running a ridiculously high fever and had to be rushed to the ER. Is there a rational explanation out there for it? Probably, but I haven't really heard one (though boy, I've had people try).

By contrast, when I was in Catholic school and people would talk about feeling the presence of Jesus in complete sincerity, all I was feeling was kinda silly for sitting in a dark room with my eyes shut. On the other hand, I've hung out with some incredibly smart priests and clergy in various faiths and I'm not sure I buy that they're just delusional nutbars when they talk about the feelings and comfort and insight they get from their faith.

And then, you get into things like the placebo effect, which apparently still works even if you know you're taking a placebo. There's a lot we don't know about how the mind works.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:59 PM on April 16, 2013 [5 favorites]


If you really want to know how solid reality is, just stay up for three or four days. It's an old and basically unanswerable question, but the simple answer is not very.
posted by Lorin at 3:09 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Note: not advocating anyone actually do that.
posted by Lorin at 3:11 PM on April 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


But is there such thing as consensus reality? Is it really that easy to establish these aspects of reality?

On thing that freaked me out once I learned that we signify everything (everything) through language was that we could all see colours differently but not really know it. Say, you could describe the colour orange and then point me to an orange to explain what it's like. But what if my orange is actually closer to a purple? All oranges would be purple then and I would in complete vain point you too all things orange and we could easily agree.

And that, just because our terminology is agreed upon, not our perception.
posted by ahtlast93 at 3:17 PM on April 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


I remember the moment I learned about non-linear time. Did you read that? Time isn't linear. It still blows my mind. We trick ourselves in order to function on a day-to-day basis As far as I'm concerned, we're all delusional.

"Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”"

There was a study done that found a part of your brain that when stimulated, causes you to "perceive presences". There were various levels of sensitivity to the stimulation; those who responded to it readily and easily perceived more 'presences' more quickly - and were more likely to believe in auras, ghosts, religion, etc. So... are they 'overly sensitive' or are us 'rational people' just unperceptive? Maybe the fact that I don't 'feel god's presence' in church means that I'm disabled, rather than a skeptic. I agree with Ruthless Bunny... we have a lot to learn!

I think the best we can do is accept that reality is not very solid, and that while other people's experiences may be different and/or weird their experiences are real to them, and that's what we have to work with.
posted by jrobin276 at 3:20 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Thanks for the thoughtful answers so far. Having had these experiences where my reality clearly and obviously collides with others' reality, I'm a believer in the subjective nature of perception. The concept of a 'consensus reality' is I think the crux of what I'm curious about, because it implies some kind of empirical testable knowledge, i.e. that there is a consensus about reality, i.e. that a majority of people agree on what reality is. Maybe there are questions we can ask people that determine whether there is a consensus reality and how closely their perceptions align with it, and we could get some sense as to how strong the consensus might be, and how many people are outside it. Maybe consensus reality is mutable from one culture to the next and maybe there is no such thing.

We've managed to do this with colourblindness. We know ~5% of people perceive colours differently. Do we know anything else? Yes, people see the world differently, but how many people, how differently? Is reality pretty solid for the average person, as the concept of consensus reality would suggest? Or is that not an answerable question?
posted by PercussivePaul at 3:40 PM on April 16, 2013


is reality pretty solid for the average person?

I think you need to clarify your question, because I'm not really understanding exactly what information you want here. What do you mean by reality being "solid"?
posted by windykites at 3:49 PM on April 16, 2013


There are well known ways people can differ. Colorblindness is one, prospoagnosia (face blindless) is another, synesthesia is another. Some people have perfect vs. relative pitch. Oliver Sacks has some books where he describes alterations of perception that happen after accidents or in disease (e.g. loss of color perception, motion blindness, hemispatial neglect).

When people learn one language versus another (or multiple languages), they are either able or unable to distinguish certain sounds. So, 'r' and 'l' might sound exactly identical to a person in Japan, but an American can hear the differences, and this perceptual difference is established during a critical period early in life.

As for me, I have astigmatism so I see halos and starbursts around lights at night. So my perception of those things is completely different from someone without astigmatism. I also see some tracers when I'm sleep deprived, that are similar to tracers that people experience during drug use. Both of those types of perceptions, from astigmatism and sleep deprivation, are things I know are generated by my brain rather than existing in the world. However they look and feel the same as stuff in the world. Indeed, when I was younger I used to believe that there were halos around street lamps for real.

As for your question about the reality or not of perception... I think that most scientists agree that the world is composed of matter and energy, and our various receptors are sensitive to certain subsets of the energy that is in the world. "Sound" and "light" are very qualitatively different to us, but really we live in a giant energetic soup. The vast difference between our experience of heat and light are illusory. Both are the same electromagnetic energy, albeit at different frequencies. We categorize our perceptions, but really we exist in an energetic soup.

There are sensory differences between species in the energy they can pick up, and probably across humans to a smaller extent... We can't see ultraviolet light, but maybe other animals can. After that, our brain transforms and processes the information at our receptors. Differences between perception can arise when there are differences in the sensors themselves, or in how the information at the sensors is processed. Both types of difference exist with a few examples above. I think most scientists assume that the underlying reality, e.g. the state of matter and energy in the world, is objectively real. They probe at it with sensors that may be more sensitive than the built in human perceptual apparatus. That's pretty much the whole gist of science. However there are some philosophies that each person sees a different reality or even that other minds don't exist, e.g. solispism. None of those are testable, of course.

If you are interested in this stuff, I would recommend LSD!
posted by htid at 3:55 PM on April 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Don't underestimate the confusion generated by language. What you're noticing is not "My friends have different experiences than I do" but "My friends report different experiences than I do." Does the difference originate in the perception, or at the point where the perception is cast into language? Maybe a little of both, but the more I think about it, the more I think the latter dominates. This is why scientists, philosophers, etc. use special kinds of language, to try to make sure they're actually talking about what they think they're talking about.
posted by brianconn at 4:12 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Sorry to keep posting- I'm just thinking about your question and I have more to say!

Ok, so there are things that the majority of people probably could agree on. For example, most people who use the same numeral system as I do will agree that 1 represents a single unit of something, and that the symbols 1+1 have the same representative meaning as 2. Likewise, if I asked most people how many apples I had, and I had 2 apples, most people would agree that I had 2 apples. So that would be a more-or-less consensus reality.

But the only thing we're consenting to is the meaning of representative concepts that we have created and agreed upon specifically so that we could share a reality and communicate. We are agreeing to things upon which we have agreed to agree. We're agreeing to tautologies, nothing more, and while the tautologies are "true" (two does equal two), they're probably not that important until you start using them for something. As soon as you look at trying to apply those agreements to real situations, you have a whole other situation.

I mean, this kind of question is almost like asking "would most people agree that the room has stairs". We need to know what room you're talking about before we can get to the heart of your question (incedentally, I feel the same way when people ask me if I believe in god). And if you want to know if most people would agree that a room with stairs has stairs, I believe a majority would. But the more specific and/or qualitative your question got, the fewer people would agree with your premise.
posted by windykites at 4:20 PM on April 16, 2013


So by "reality", you mean, your experience?
posted by thelonius at 4:45 PM on April 16, 2013


Response by poster: Thanks everyone. thelonius, I'm struggling to phrase this a bit, but it feels like some people have been telling me they see the world in colour while I see it in black and white, and I'm trying to make sense of this. I've used 'solid' as a shorthand to mean something like 'rational-scientific', 'disenchanted'. As in, no spirits or magic or auras, no hallucinations, a rock is a rock. I feel slightly put on the spot and cornered by the difficulty in separating my own experience from what I'm trying to describe, so I hope you can understand that I am trying to place my own reality in the broader context of what others perceive.
posted by PercussivePaul at 5:03 PM on April 16, 2013


Part of your sense of reality also has to do with your ability to describe it. In listening to an episode of Radio Lab (Colors Episode of WNYC's Radio Lab) they discuss how the perception and ability to talk about color can change how you view the world.

Example: In old literature, the ocean was described as "dark" or "green" but most of us who can see colors would now describe it as "blue". Why? Back then there wasn't really a word for the color "blue" as it doesn't occur that often in nature.

Example: A dad didn't tell his daughter that "the sky is blue" and would often ask her to describe the sky. She often described it as "white".

Therefore how people perceive reality may be due to the words they have available to describe it, and the past experiences they have to interpret it.

You know how when you learn the meaning to a new word, you suddenly hear it everywhere? In reality you probably heard that word a ton of times, but ignored it because you didn't know what it meant.
posted by Crystalinne at 5:14 PM on April 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Perception is also affected by the childhood environment. I perceived the hallucinatory experiences peppering my life since early childhood in religio/spiritual terms because I was raised in a conservative religious home, that was the language I knew. All along my college and young adult years I had the belief that science just didn't yet have the answers to the many strange things I encountered in my life and I continued to live a religious life, albeit drastically different than that of my childhood. I was 32 y.o. when it was discovered/diagnosed that I had a very active case of Temporal lobe epilepsy, the trigger for the hallucinations.

Sometimes it seems so very strange how quickly I ended up as an atheist. I am now convinced that my empathetic abilities stem from unconsciously learning typical "tells". The world was a very magical place to me before I was diagnosed. Luckily, science has a lot of wonderful things to fill that gap.
posted by _paegan_ at 6:00 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


I don't think dividing perceptions into "hallucinations/magic" and "solid" is doing you any favors here. There are a lot of gray areas, synesthesia being the most obvious one, but also differences in color perception and hearing. These ways of perceiving may not be common, but they certainly aren't hallucinations.

I'm pretty well convinced that I have a lot of sensory abnormalities compared to most people. I have a hard time doing certain ordering tasks with colors (ie, I don't understand how you can put colors in an order from one hue to another), and there are colors and patterns my eyes "screw up" in ways that would mean nobody made clothes or posters using those colors and patterns if everyone had my same senses (unless "nauseating stripes" were the hot new look for summer for some reason). I don't think there's anything hallucinatory about the way I experience reality but I also don't think it's typical. And certainly I've never been diagnosed as colorblind. We have categories for common unusual ways of experiencing reality, but my own sensory experience has led me to believe that there are probably plenty of people with less common unusual ways of experiencing reality who don't have a label for what they're experiencing. We've seen examples of this come up on MeFi a few times, this being the most memorable one to me. There's also stuff like people being able or unable to smell the asparagus pee smell, or the two different ways of tasting cilantro.

So if you frame your question in the way I'm reading it, the question is, what percentage of people do not perceive sensory reality in a way that's at all unusual? I don't think there's any way to answer that, since most people assume their way of perceiving reality is consensus reality. Unless you have an unusual way of perceiving that makes common stimuli actively unpleasant or totally meaningless to you, there would be no reason to ever consider that yours was anything other than a normal experience.
posted by town of cats at 7:18 PM on April 16, 2013


Best answer: This is an interesting question that touches on lots of meaty philosophical problems. Phenomenology and philosophy of mind might help you articulate the problem and clarify your thoughts. (But they won't give you any answers!) Here are a few things to think about:

How are subjective sense perceptions related to the world outside your head? If you perceive a shimmering blue aura around someone's head, must a shimmering blue aura actually exist out there somewhere? If someone else sees the aura but you can't, who is in error about reality? And if hallucinations are possible, can you trust your beliefs or perceive things at all? You sound like a materialist ("I consider myself a scientist and I do not believe that objects really do give off emotional signals, or that spirits and ghosts are real") and representationalist ("However, I am convinced that these people are accurately describing the reality that they perceive"), and synesthesia is indeed one counterexample to representational theories of consciousness.

Second, what's the deal with subjective mental states inside our heads? Someone can report to you that they see a shimmering blue aura, but what is it like to see one? Philosophers call these qualia, and they will lead you to all kinds of great thought experiments about zombies, mad scientists, and what it is like to be a bat. Can we describe these states to others or compare them between different people? Do they even actually exist? Answering your "how differently" question requires thinking about what it is like to percieve particular things and man oh man, turns out that's pretty tough.
posted by ecmendenhall at 8:03 PM on April 16, 2013 [5 favorites]


Response by poster: Down the rabbit hole I go. Thank you ecmendenhall. I never knew what my 'isms' were.

More questions than answers here, naturally, but very interesting stuff.
posted by PercussivePaul at 11:44 PM on April 16, 2013


People are social critters, and we're amazingly sensitive to other peoples emotional states. We usually can't explain how we pick up on this. We just say that we have a feeling someone's not being honest with us, or that we can sense that they're worried, etc. Presumably, we're picking up on subtle changes in people's facial expressions, posture, breathing and intonation, but for the most part we're not consciously aware of how we do this, we're just aware of the end result ‒ that we can sense other people's emotions. Not being able to do this (autistic people can't) is a severe disability.

Most of the differences between your perceptions and your friends' seem to be based on whether you interpret your perceptions of other people's emotional states as being your own reactions to them, or something emanating from them. If you understand it as coming from other people, you can easily apply this to your reactions to inanimate things, like paintings, architecture or places that feel a certain way.

(Until I read your question, it had never occurred to me that perceiving auras might be related to synaesthesia, but it makes perfect sense. If some musicians can see chords as colors, some people could map perceived emotional states onto colors in the same way. You meant to imply that, right? Or did I misread that into your question?)
posted by nangar at 5:02 AM on April 17, 2013


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