Hi John, All
A couple of things come to mind, having trained as a scientist in my earlier
life, I recall an experiment where from birth, kittens were brought up in a
room where there were no horizontal lines at all, only vertical ones!!
After 6mths the now young cats were allowed out into the real world, where
they constantly walked into low tables, ans any obstacles with horizontal
surfaces. The conclusion from this is that the brain in these cats never
developed the connections to process horizontal lines, they were in fact
"blind " laterally, although this did very slowly develop in these cats.
To expand upon this we can only see patterns we have been exposed to in our
formative years, after the age of five or so it is highly unlikely that we
will develop new neural pathways, therefore our perception of any reality is
a combination of all the patterns we see in those first five years.
This really is important to grasp- we cannot see things which are not made
up of any of the visual patterns, or any combination of these patterns, that
we have been exposed to in the period when our visual cortex is developing.
We are blind to any new patterns, as are the cats to horizontal lines.
What these new patterns might be, who knows... the point being we never
will!!
As to the statement that more than half of what we see is created within the
brain, this may be true indeed, but relates rather to the nature of our
brain, in that it likes to classify things, when we see a tree we don't see
every new detail of this tree, our brain simply references this tree to
others it has seen, and calls this new image tree, Oak, Pine or whatever, as
we become more knowledgable our categories become more and more refined.
We become so good at this we can walk all day around a busy city, and never
really "see" anything at all.... everything is processed and categorised
subconsciously. If we didn't do this our brains would spend too much time
analysing every detail of our surroundings, and evolutionally this would
have been disastrous as we would never be able to see danger before it was
too late.
It is only when, as with the plains indians or with zen buddhists, we try to
move beyond these patterns by means of meditation/starvation, or with help
of hallucinogens, that we again see the world with fresh eyes. Try getting
stoned in a forest and just see how much more detail you are aware of, it
really is amazing just how much our brain bypasses all this visual info., in
our everyday lives.
The exception to this is with some autistics who really do see things as
they are... they have lost these visual processing routines... often giving
them an superlative artistic ability.
Phew that felt good!!!
Rod
on 2/22/02 3:01 AM, John Beasley at beasley@austarnet.com.au wrote:
> 3WD
>
> PS: I still think we might all just be on a "solipsist journey" not in
> the sense that "nothing is real but the self" but that each individual
> "self" makes up so much of what it calls "reality" along the way that it
> might as well be.
>
> Great insight! This is indeed what I have been arguing for some time. If we
> look at recent studies of visual perception, the evidence seems to indicate
> that more than half of what we perceive actually comes from within, from the
> memories of past visual experience, and the projections that future
> experiences will follow predictable patterns. (I don't have references -
> you'll have to trust my memory.)
> And this is in fairly technical experiments where there is no great
> emotional investment, unlike much of real life.
>
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