The Nuances of Seeing

Influenced by culture and biological survival, our minds tend to block out excessive information from our surroundings and filter it out to grant us what is most necessary for survival in the moment. However, these ‘universal truths’ are not always a straightforward case: psychoactive drugs, mental illnesses and other factors can greatly impact how humans perceive the world. The truth behind the world is often more than just the common fact of the orange ball being an orange fruit: someone who is colorblind or someone who suffers from schizophrenia will see the ball not as an orange, but as something true to them individually.

If our vision changed from one moment to the next and we could no longer see color, what meanings would we now get from what we see? If perception can be manipulated through psychoactive substances or traumatic experiences, then what becomes of the truth behind our perception? For instance, the subject of Oliver Sacks’ Case of the Colorblind Painter, is a skilled painter who suddenly becomes colorblind after a car accident.[1]The painter no longer attributed the same meaning to his surroundings as he did before the accident. What he saw now was ‘distasteful, the whites glaring, yet discolored and off-white, the blacks cavernous — everything wrong, unnatural, stained, and impure.’[2]To the painter’s horror, what he had taken for granted in his vision was now no longer true. In fact, we tend to become accustomed to things like color or motion in our vision and we fail to realize the complex cerebral process that goes behind the construction of these ‘givens.[3] As Michael Pollan put it in How to Change Your Mind:

We approach experience much like an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.

By this Pollan means to say that, as we grow older, we no longer take in the full depth of what we perceive, but rather quickly run it through our mind and remove anything that is deemed arbitrary to survival.[4]

Recently, I have been working heavily with visual and aural effects which alter based on certain conditions or actions. This is prevalent throughout my thesis video game and forms its backbone. Strong and vivid lights and colors dance and move around the player as they turn their gaze in different directions, while sounds will dampen or amplify depending on where the player is. As the player moves through the space, it will react to their presence, changing textures and lights, and revealing elements in the space that were not present at first glance. The experience breaks down the superficial meanings we place in our surroundings and goads the player to experience a deeper meaning and a truth that they, individually, can perceive. Staring at a wall’s surface directly, the player only sees it in a single plane, unmoving and one dimensional. However, when they turn their gaze in any direction, the wall’s texture vibrates and changes, revealing more than the player could ever gain by simply staring at the wall head on.

It is apparent that the act of seeing has the heaviest weight, of all the senses, in terms of discerning the world around us. In Western culture, sight has been linked to thought itself, where thinking is based on what we see.[5] Greek philosophers like Aquinas and Plato have all spoken to the importance of visual perception, where philosophical writings since them connect knowledge with clear sight.[6] Having created an ocularcentric way of experiencing space and the world around us, while building up visual perception as the most important means of seeing truth in the world, what we expect to see has become what we expect to be true. Shapes and forms come with their own preconceived meanings. We regard a vertical flat surface perpendicular to another flat surface, which are both, in turn, parallel to another flat surface, respectively, as a box or cube. Scale the size of this box or cube to human proportions and we now regard these surfaces as a room. The truth behind this fact is in that we can see the surfaces and their texture and make out that they must be a room if we are confined within them. As such, the architecture of space is molded by our sight to be understood and tolerated in human terms.[7] Space itself is limitless and sight is used to grant it meaning and dimension.[8] Through textures and surfaces, we attribute meaning to our surroundings when we lend our gaze to them. This also means that time ceases to be endless, and we can understand this in human terms as well; if we were to walk from one wall within a room to another then we can gauge that we spent a few seconds doing that, whereas walking on a vast and empty plane would make acknowledging the amount of time spent arduous. As mentioned, culture and prior knowledge have a heavy impact on how we perceive the world; they allow us to make perceptual hypotheses that actually make more sense to us than what we actually see in front of us.[9] In an experiment where blind people were asked to sort color words on their similarity, they produced very similar arrangements to those of sighted people.[10] They were able to do this because, even with no visual perception, they have a general understanding that an object such as a lemon is yellow.[11] Even before we turn to look at something we already ‘know’ what we will see.

What happens if our sight, however, stopped being such a reliable tool in understanding our surroundings in human terms? If perception can be manipulated through other conditions, such as mental illness, trauma or psychoactive substances, then what becomes of the truth behind our perception? It ceases to be the universal truth that the Greek philosophers and beyond regarded in our ocularcentric universe.[12]If the walls within a room or corridor have a texture we do not recognize, or if their seams become blurred and difficult to discern, then the space no longer has the truth we presumed it would have. Aldous Huxley speaks of this in Doors of Perception after taking mescaline for the first time. He refers to the walls within his room no longer meeting at right angles while his mind ceased to factor in spatial perception and notions of distance and place.[13] Based on his experience, we can deduce that under certain conditions, our mind stops lending importance to the preconceived facts that our biological morphology, in tandem with society and culture, has trained us to believe in so staunchly. Suppose that we see a tree but that the tree is not actually there as a physical object and is, as such, a hallucination. Traditional philosophers argued that anything we see is identical to the veridical experience of perceiving an object, essentially meaning that even a hallucination is a true experience.[14] If both the hallucination and the perception of a real object are true, then to what extent is what we see ‘real’?

Oliver Sacks discusses various connections to hallucinations and how the brain functions which further depreciates the value of the collective universal truth. Indeed, certain parts of the brain, which are responsible for perceiving certain specificities like faces, can trigger hallucinations when they are subjected to ‘abnormal’ conditions, or mind glitches.[15] In an elderly patient of Sacks’, we can see how when the brain is put through stress and trauma, hallucinations can occur, and perception is altered: Rosalie, a 90 year old woman, experienced very vivid and ‘real’ visions of people occupying her room after she had an exhaustive and traumatic day following an injury.[16] Once she calmed down over the ensuing days, her visions slowly dissipated and lost their intensity. Similarly, Aldous Huxley refers to the use of the stroboscope to trigger colored light patterns by influencing the visual center of the brain and optic nerves.[17] When combined with lysergic acid, the stroboscope actually triggered visions akin to Japanese landscape paintings in one subject that Huxley describes.[18] Again, the influence of mental factors, as well as external conditions, on our perception is pronounced here. When these are considered, how ‘true’ are these universal truths?

The enhanced perception described by Huxley becomes painfully prominent in sufferers of schizophrenia as well as other mental conditions. Indeed, the schizophrenic mind experiences this ‘source of bliss’ and ‘the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context,’ as a source of menace and horror.[19] This menace can be found in the work of artists as well, such as in the later works of Van Gogh and Francisco Goya, both of whom suffered from their own personal depressions.[20] Van Gogh underwent many perceptual changes during the last few years prior to his death. In paintings like Starry Night, ‘his perceptions took the form of spiraling, flamelike apparitions,’ while in later works, ‘his forms no longer spiral but vibrate- revealing with great intensity a sense of tragedy.’[21] In Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, the nature of what he perceived is transfigured to become a nightmarish and almost demonic rendering.[22] This is true of his other works, such as The 1821 Derby at Epsom, with its ominous and hellish sky and gaunt horses. This was, in fact, because Gericault experienced different perceptual truths from his observations of the world. Yet, it is not only in the works of famous artists that we can see varying perceptions and alternative truths influenced by mental illness. In fact, there have been many collections of artworks made by institutionalized individuals from the 1920s in Paris and Switzerland.[23] For example, in a drawing-collage made by a mentally ill man named Victor-Francois, a figure of Christ is depicted as having gone insane, hinting that a form of madness has become divine.[24] Victor perceived madness as his reality. Other artists draw different moods and profundity from their surroundings. In Claude Monet’s work, particularly in his paintings of water lilies, he painted them as they are in their own context.[25] Monet had painted his lilies not as humans would perceive them and measure them to themselves, but as lilies being measured as lilies.

If our sight becomes muddled or altered because of the aforementioned factors, then this alters the truth of our surroundings. Our mind is designed to protect us from being overwhelmed through eliminating any knowledge but those most essential to survival.[26] Michael Pollan mentions this in How to Change Your Mind; as we grow older and experience more of our surroundings, our minds conventionalize what we see and apply shorthand modes of perception for the sake of biological convenience.[27] However, through drugs such as lysergic acid, this shorthand method of perception is disabled and we can, again, view our surroundings more vividly and profoundly, as though seeing them for the first time.

To conclude, our perception and how we use it to experience the world has evolved to prohibit us from becoming overwhelmed by too much information, in a bid to emphasize our survival. However, we have to come to terms with the fact that what we experience through the lens of survival is not all that is there and, more importantly, not the only truth present in our surroundings. Indeed, many factors can influence perception and grant different truths, factors like the use of psychoactive drugs or mental health conditions.

Bibliography

Delistraty Cody, ‘’The Art of Madness’’, The Paris Review, February 6th, 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/06/the-art-of-madness/

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2001. The Man Who Walked in Color. Minneapolis: Univocal.

Huxley, Aldous. 1954. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Great Britain: Penguin Books.

Juhani, Pallasmaa. 2005. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy.

Pollan, Michael. 2018. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. USA: Penguin Books.

Sacks, Oliver. 1987. The Case of the Colorblind Painter. New York: The New York Review of Books.

Sacks, Oliver. 2012. Hallucinations. Toronto: Random House.

Searle, John R. “The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument.” In Wirklichkeit Oder Konstruktion?: Sprachtheoretische Und Interdisziplinäre Aspekte Einer Brisanten Alternative, edited by Felder Ekkehard and Gardt Andreas, 66-76. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Accessed October 16, 2020.

Vernon McCay and Baughman Marjie L., ‘’Art, Madness, and Human Interaction.’’Art Journal, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer, 1972), pp. 413-420