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For about a year now, I’ve become very interested in the way the mind works and particularly in how the development of cognitive science has
contributed to our understanding of the human brain. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this scientific field is that after several millennia of philosophical speculation empirical evidence is starting to surface as to how it all works.
In considering it’s importance to visual arts, I thought I’d write a little bit on what we have learned about perception in the last few decades. Not being a scientist, I’ll try to avoid the technical jargon and get straight to the neat stuff.
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See This
The primary role of perception is to process sensory information and to create mental models of the world. At every moment the information changes leaving the brain to constantly interpret and reinterpret the data, and to continually reconstruct and organize it in order to make sense.
While it is still not entirely understood, it is known to cognitive science that vision goes well beyond providing the brain with optical information. It would appear that the function of visual systems build upon sensory stimulation in addition to corresponding to internal models of perception. It’s because of these innate perceptions that ambiguous imagery and illusions work. That these illusions are nearly universal for humans is evidence of the commonality of our conceptual system.
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Blindsight
A common misunderstanding about the nature of sight is the belief that the real work of seeing takes place in the eyes. Truly, the eye is merely an instrument, and like all the major senses, sight takes place in the brain. Nothing makes this so clear, perhaps, as the realization that we all have a blind spot, yet in normal cases it goes unnoticed.
The blind spot is the place in the back of the eyeball where the optic nerve connects the eye to the brain. As light shines on the eye, one would expect the nerve area without any rod or cone cells to show up as an absence of light. A black spot. Why don’t we see a spot following us everywhere we go? It’s what cognitive science describes as the brain’s “filling-in” trick. By analyzing the areas around the spot, the brain is able to create a patch over the blind spot. The brain does this so quickly, and without ever telling us what it’s doing that we never have to be aware of it.
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Soundseeing
Our language tends to compartmentalize our thoughts andfeelings and to organize our senses into nouns, verbs, descriptions, etc. This may often give the illusion of the world operating in the same way. However, though our language may divide our senses, our mind does not. Our consciousness may be fixed to one or two things at a time, but our brain reads the world through all the senses. The brain is constantly mixing the incoming data and constructing, at least in our subconsciousness, an abundance of information, ready to surface when we least expect it.
Neuroscientists at England’s University College of London recently did a study on the effects the visual senses may have on our perception of sound. The study looked specifically at the work of Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky, whom was known for doing abstract expressionist paintings with the attempt of mimicking the sounds of an orchestra. While it is uncertain if Kandinsky had the condition himself, there is a rare genetic abnormality called synaesthesia, in which senses are connected in such a way that their sense of vision and hearing are both triggered with stimulation.
The study involved showing 200 people 100 different images and allowing them to choose the animations they thought best fitted with the music. Though the individuals did not have synaethetes, they consistently selected the same imagines as inviduals known tohave the condition. These findings seemed to show that even people without synaesthesia can appreciate the cross references of sight and sound. It is thought that this phenomenon may help future studies on the way our senses are linked together in the human brain.
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Mind Mirror
Significant advancement has been made in the study of human evolution and especially in the workings of human brain. One of the more interesting findings of note is a discovery from about 15 years ago of “mirror neurons.” These neuronshave been found in the Broca’s area (language processing) and parietal lobe (sensory information) of the brain. These specific types of neurons are believed to be associated with a human’s capacity to learn language, empathize, imitate, and even in how to read the intentions of others.
What is most fascinating about the mirror neurons, however, is really in how they behave. When observing another person act out a behavior, the neurons of the observer reflect the behavior and run the functions through the brain sending signals to the muscles as if the observer was actually performing the behavior. The sequence played out by the mirror neurons is the same whether the individual is merely observing the behavior or actually performing the behavior.
It’s important to point this out as a way to show just how much influence the outer world has on the human brain and it’s behaviors. While so much about individuals can be found in the DNA, from the day weare born, our culture and language help to make up a great deal of who we are and how we feel.
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This Side Up
One of the key realizations psychology has made since the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950s, is just how important the role of metaphors play in human thought. Though this has long been the assumption for artists and much of Eastern philosophy, it has introduced, what seems at first, a counter-intuitive dimension to our understanding of the mind. In terms of perception, these metaphors not only appear in how we conceptualize and communicate, but in how we interpret what we see.
Among the first things any organism must do in life is orient itself to what is up and what is down. Even the most simple bacterium knows how to do this even though it clearly has no brain. As basic as this is, humans have the additional challenge of relying heavily on vision and cultural interpretations for their sense of direction. While this is certainly good news for those seeking creative ways about how to interpret the world, it also adds a degree of confusion to our understanding of ourselves and what we collectively consider “reality.”
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Relative Absolutes
The cognitive psychologist, George Miller, divides discrimination as we perceive it into two categories. First, there is the absolute discrimination, which is any judgement requiring unique memory. This is essentially what we do when we assign names to our experiences. However, the capacity to assign a unique names is limited to the finite way our mind works in a given context.
More often that not, we rely on relative discrimination. This is the sort of judgement that enables us to decern between similar and dissimilar things at a glance. There isn’t really any memory required here since our mental capacity is narrowed down to making quick comparisons. Ultimately, what this shows is that we perceive less about the world than there really is, and in a sense, it’s not possible or even pragmatic for us to remember everything.
Even if we did have analogue memories, as our computers do, and were capable of making absolute judgments all the time, it would be necessary to reduce the input to what is relevant, or compress experience memories to make room for new ones. While it may be troublesome to think most of our memory is made with vague, often relative judgements, one can appreciate now with the development of technology and its’ inherent limited capacity, just how remarkably flexible our minds really are and how extrodinary is the design of the human brain.
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I have presented only a small glimps at what has been learned about human perception in recent decades. Cognitive science has opened new doors to the exploration of the human mind and how societies works. At least for the moment the possibilities seem infinite. There is , however, a certain catch to this new understanding in that it also exposes our natural limitations. Yet, it may finally solve many of the mysteries philosophy has debated since before recorded history.
What these new insights in to human perception and our senses show us, is that the world in which we live will forever have the capacity to surprise us. Though, this knowledge may pose a problem for those who desire absolute answers for everything, as an artist, I can’t conceive why we would want it any other way.
Sources and Related Materials:
Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology,
by Stephen E. Palmer© 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and it’s Challenge to Western Thought
© 1999 by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
Originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, by George A. Miller
(Found online here: http://www.well.com/~smalin/miller.html)
Stumbling on Happiness
by Daniel Gilbert, © 2006 Random House
Images, Objects, and Illusions
© 1963, 1965, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973 and 1974 by Scientific American, Inc.
