we're all magical creatures

In this week's readings, I was really struck by the theme of our personal experience of vision. Listening to the radio spot on Stereo Sue, you can really hear the awe and delight in her voice as she describes her first few experiences with things floating and popping out in her field of vision.
Sacks' piece also focused on the personal experience (as his work so often does--his own experience and that of the object of the case study). In typical Sacks form, he describes with glee his youthful forays into photography and stereoscopy. And this hobby continued into his adulthood. I thought it was an excellent illustration of how childhood interests inform our adult selves, how we keep coming back to the same kinds of curiosities and questions. One sees it as quite fitting, that a boy who liked to play with his visual perception and explore ways of manipulating it would become a man who studies the brain and its aberrations.
Sacks spoke of the stereoscopic society he belongs to:
"Unlike most, we do not take stereoscopy for granted but revel in it. While most people may not notice any great change if they close one eye, we stereophiles are sharply conscious of the change, as our world suddenly loses its spaciousness and depth. Perhaps we rely more on stereoscopy, or perhaps we are simply more aware of it. We want to understand how it works. The problem is not a trivial one, for if one can understand stereoscopy, one can understand not only a simple and brilliant visual stratagem but something of the nature of visual awareness, and of consciousness itself."
I was thinking about this, too, in regards to our next paper topic. Like Sacks, artists explore and exploit the ways that they interact with and perceive their environments. That sense of discovery and play really links, for me, artistic experiment and scientific experiment. Artists and scientists both are both "shaprly conscious of the change", whether we're talking about stereoscopic vision or other kinds of phenomenon we encounter.
On the other hand, we have Sue, who intellectually understood stereoscopic vision, and could even teach on the subject--but never experienced it. Then, when her vision training began to pay off and she started seeing depth in relief, the scientific knowledge she had only added to the wonder of this new facet of vision--and more broadly, life.
I was reminded of a time when I was a small kid, before I'd ever been given a Magic Eye book or read anything about vision. The walls and ceiling in my bedroom were textured, one of those unfortunate features of suburban development from the 80s. I used to lie in bed and make the texture reverse depth. I thought I was magical because I could do this, and it was my own secret game--then I began turning it to things in the outer world. When I got a Magic Eye book, I reveled in the fact that I could grasp the hidden images faster than my family. Then I got to talking to my father about it, and he explained how the Magic Eye worked, and for the first time I realized that my secret magic talent was actually a somewhat ordinary function of human vision--the ability to converge or diverge the images. I sulked about it for a while, but as I've grown older I'm more and more interested in those perceptual tricks we might discover as children and then learn that they are common to all people. It's a different kind of magic.

A magic eye image for you! (Another note: I was really surprised to find that these images can be viewed on a computer screen. I thought maybe the LED display would interfere with the effect. But no!)
http://wright-pc.com/pyr0/magic.eye.jpg