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Seeing is creating (and believing)

By on October 1, 2009

Imagine how difficult life would be if you saw everything upside-down and flipped around; if right were left and up were down, and we walked on the ceiling instead of the ground.  

 

Fortunately, that’s not the way we see things. We can trust our eyes to show things as they are…

 

Well, not so fast—our eyes actually do see things upside down! The inside back of the eyeball is an area called the retina. Think of it like a small movie screen.  And like a movie screen, light carrying pictures is projected onto the retina. But unlike movie projection, when that light comes in through the lens of the eye, it crosses-over and projects the picture on our little movie screens upside-down and backwards. That’s something they won’t do in movie theaters. With the price of tickets these days, it would probably upset movie goers.

 

So, if you’re looking at a tree, there is actually a little reversed, upside-down light-image of that tree on the inside backs of your eyeballs.

 

Then, you ask, why don’t we see things upside down?

 

Okay, wait—let me finish the story…

 

Now the really interesting thing is that that little upside-down image is the final visible light-picture occurring in vision. The retina is made up of millions of tiny light-sensitive cells (called “rods” and “cones,” yet having nothing to do with fishing or ice cream). I suppose they’re like the little pixel units that make up your TV or computer screen. When light hits one of these cells, it starts a chemical reaction.  

 

So, light triggers chemistry… then what?

 

Well, each one of those “pixel-cells” is attached to nerves that connect all the way to the back of the brain. Those nerves connecting the eye’s little “movie screen” to the brain are like bundles of electrical wires. That chemical reaction to light starts an electrical signal darting to the brain.

 

So, we’ve gone from light—an upside-down picture of what we’re looking at—to chemistry, to electricity. It seems as though we’re moving further away from a simple, accurate picture of a tree. It’s becoming something else, somewhere else…

 

If the brain and eye were connected with a series of mirrors or lenses, like in a telescope, then we might expect to see an actual light-image of the tree inside someone’s brain (assuming they would let us peek in there).

 

What does the brain do with those electrical signals? It creates a right-side-up mental image of the tree. Notice we said “creates.” And notice that we said “mental” image.  There is no tiny little light-image, like we might see on a movie screen, in the brain. What we really see is actually a mental or psychic creation. Just where exactly is that picture? If you find it, please let me know.

 

Now consider that that mind-creation is constantly being updated. You can prove to yourself that the eye’s area of focus is surprisingly narrow.  That means that to see something, our eyes need to move, to scan all over the things we look at. Each viewpoint is its own picture, starting the light/chemistry/electricity cycle all over again to continually add to the mental picture we’re creating, which is surprisingly whole and singular, considering all the fragments and snippets of vision that comprise it.

 

Then consider that the mental picture we create of the thing before us is filtered through previous memories of the same or similar objects, and the concepts built upon them—in other words, vision is critically dependent upon past memories and learned ideas, personal experiences which always have their limits.

 

What does all of this have to do with art?

 

Well, if art has anything to do with vision, then we might be well-served to know, as the writer Anais Nin once put it, that “we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” If you think about these ideas, you will possibly arrive at many surprising insights, and understand “seeing is believing” in a whole new light.

 

Next time maybe we’ll consider the age-old question: If that tree we’ve been talking about falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

 

Hint: No.

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