A New Set of Eyes

Last year I took Narrative Neuropsychology, also taught by Elizabeth. Through writings by Oliver Sacks and others, we examined processes of the human brain that - when they work well - exist outside of our conscious perception and thought, but which as a result of injury or illness may be suddenly thrust into our awareness in all their baffling complexity. No one ever thinks about exactly how and why we forget some things and remember others, recognize people, or identify objects until a malfunction occurs, making us painfully aware of how the process has gone wrong - and accordingly giving us insight into how it must have worked in the first place.

In this class we've explored this theme with a specific focus on the realm of visual perception. Vision is, like the many neurological functions we examined in Narrative Neuropsychology, is common to all of us, and therefore we can't help but learn much about ourselves through the readings. Vision is arguably even more basic than memory or object recognition, so what we learn can give us insight into our most fundamental experiences and earliest memories.

In chapter four of Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, for example, Margaret Livingstone explains the characteristics of our visual system that allow children from a very young age to identify consistent colors, regardless of the variability of the wavelengths being reflected off of an object. A child's ability to identify a colored block as green may represent to us one of the most basic of human neurological capabilities, but that is only because the process behind color identification and discounting the illuminant are hidden from us. Livingstone's chapters allow us to conceive of how intricate and incredible our most "basic" abilities really are.

Robert Solso, in chapters three and four of The Psychology of Art, augments the understanding of the biological processes behind color with an evolutionary analysis of human visual capability. Just as we are often completely blind to the functions of the brain that allow us to perceive and understand visual information, we lack a connection to the long evolutionary history that would explain what allowed those brain functions to develop.

A lack of an understanding of history compounds the problems created by our innate inability to separate out all of the brain's intricate processes. We may, for example, learn about the "where" and the "what" systems, but our understanding of them is not complete without the revelation of the "what" system as a possible primate "add-on." I was fascinated by this idea, and the visual it inspired in me: that of all of human evolution as an ancient rock that, when split in half, might reveal all the different colored layers laid on top of each other that spell out the story of its entire existence. Obviously we can't just crack ourselves open to reveal the map of our evolution like the layers of a rock or a tree's rings, but we can open our minds to the concept that we are not simply a "new" species that evolved from something else, changing its structure completely - but that we contain our own history, buried below the more obvious new layers and continuing to exist in the form of the so-called reptilian brain or the "old" where system.

Livingstone touches upon that aspect of evolutionary theory in The Biology of Seeing, but Solso provides a more detailed and surprisingly accessible explanation. That accessibility, however, undermines Solso's argument in my opinion. His condensation of all of human visual adaptation into a chapter and a few bullet points conceals the true character of evolutionary theory, which is - as I understand it - much more complex and unknowable than Solso would have us believe.

I did, however, find Solso's mention of body temperature as a factor in the development of the human brain to be fascinating - something I hadn't heard of before. Although his account of human evolution may be oversimplified in my opinion, there weren't any details in it that were necessarily "wrong." It may in fact be helpful to keep in mind Solso's simple explanation of human evolution - "The brain evolved complex cognitive mechanisms to survive in a changing environment" - while we move on to increasingly complex aspects of the visual system. Additionally, the introduction of the concept of parallel processing - and particularly the "massive" parallel processing that goes on in the human brain - is critical to our understanding of our visual system as one that is simultaneously fast, complex, and blissfully beyond our conscious perception.

Through Solso's and Livingstone's chapters, I came to understand my fascination with the visual system as the result of natural human ignorance. As a result of our own neurological composition and a couple million years' separation from our beginnings, we lack access to both our present and our past - the everyday chemical and electrical operation of our own brains and the evolutionary history that would start to explain why it happens that way. Art & Visual Perception is fascinating because it begins to illuminate that which is both extremely close - in our own bodies - and extremely distant as a result of the knowledge we lack about our own selves. All psychology classes may offer such illumination, but this one stands apart from the rest in that it seeks to address those neurological processes that are most fundamental to our experience. We expect to find human emotion and memory to be complex, while the stunning complexity of "basic" functions is taken for granted. The truth that we learn does not give us a new set of eyes, per se, but allows us to use the same set to see the same things in a completely different way.