Do we perceive scale accurately?

The short answer is no and this is yet another example as to why life is illusory. Just like ancient philosophers from the Buddha to Socrates told us. Their message to us wasn’t that life is unintelligible, but that we should embrace inquiry more than answers.

Volume is a strange concept. When you increase the size of something, it’s volume increases exponentially. At times, this tricks us even though we kind of get it. We observe it when we see two men about to fight but one of them is shorter. Instinctively we know his stature is a big disadvantage. That’s our instincts correctly at work.

Now, the key insight here is that our perception tends to underestimate the disadvantage. To illustrate, let’s take two balloons where one is twice as big as the other. When we look at them, it can feel like two of the half sized ones is about equal to the big one. However, when you test this perception the larger one is exponentially larger, not just 2 times but more like 8 times bigger! Really!! It takes 8 times the air in the smaller one to fill it.