‘The
eye and brain are not like a fax machine,
nor are there little people looking at the
images coming in’
– Torsten Wiesel
The
puzzle of seeing
In
English, there are 2 essential words to express the faculty
and the act of seeing: 1) ‘see’, 2) ‘view’.
The etymological sense of the words see and view are “follow
something with the eyes” (from the Indo-European *seq)
and “have learned” (from the Indo-European *weid).
So, for our ancestors, an image was something to shape with
the eyes (follow with the eye) and information taken from the
real world (having learned from this visual perception).
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), seeing isn’t some kind of
direct perception of reality. Atcually, our bairns are cnostanlty itnerperting,
corrceting and gviing srtuctrues to the viusal ipnut form our eeys (see footnote
below). If this were not the case, we wouldn’t see any colors,
and we would probably see the world upside down! We would also notice in our
visual field a very large dot, called the blind spot, where the optical nerve
enters the eye.
Another
interesting everyday paradox of our vision is that we don’t
see the edges of our visual field! In fact, we should see black
zones outside of our visual field, but our brains cancel out
these zones with a smooth fade-out effect.
We’ve
always been fascinated and impressed by how people with partial
or total visual sensory deficiencies interact with the world.
We cannot talk about visual perception or optical illusions
without mentioning the other side of the coin... To understand
how these people ‘see’ without sight is to understand
just how important our sense of sight is (sometimes we don’t
do it justice or give it the importance it deserves) and how
it collaborates and integrates with the other sense organs.
Have you ever asked yourself what it is, when we see, walk, speak,
feel and touch all at the same time, that links our sight with the sense of touch
or hearing? The reality is we actually see very little: only that on
which we are concentrating, or which we find important. Man without
the crutches of the other sense organs would truly be lost, because it is they
which permit us, subconsciously, to go about our everyday lives. An experiment
demonstrated how at times we are really ‘blind’ in the truest sense
of the word. In this famous experiment on ‘inattentional blindness’,
performed in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris asked people to watch
a video clip and count the number of times one of two teams of basketball players
took possession of the ball. Many people (around 40 percent) didn’t notice
at all a man in a gorilla suit entering stage right, doing a jig in the centre
of the screen and then leaving, stage left. The clip demonstrated how we don’t
see what we don’t pay attention to, even when it’s in front of our
eyes!
*Most
probably your brain has automatically corrected the sentence
in “actually, our brains are constantly interpreting,
correcting and giving structure to the visual input from
our eyes”. It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Our Philosophy and Goals What
is an Optical illusion?
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