Binoculars!

I found a bunch of interesting stuff in this weeks articles, so I'll go through only a few of the. One thing that intrigued me was the descriptions in both the Sacks and Morgan articles about what it is like to live with monocular vision. Just as Sue was unable to imagine what she was missing before she learned to see binocularly, I found it extremely difficult to picture life on a mostly two-dimensional plane. My first thought after reading her description of flowers with her newly acquired 3-D abilities, how they seem "'intensely real, inflated,' where they were 'flat' before" was along the lines of well yes, they look real because they ARE real. How else would they look? Yet Sacks, as usual, has a way of communicating a condition that is normally completely out of the grasp of a neurotypical individual in an impressively relatable way. He utilizes a recognizable artistic trait that most everyone does, closing one eye in order to frame a shot with a camera, to illustrate the effects of monocular vision. Morgan on the other hand, with his Cyclopean vision, fails (in my opinion) to relate the condition as clearly. This is a classic example of the big dilemma in neuropsychological literature; how does one convey, in simple terms, the extent of a disorder or condition that is to the majority of the audience simply ineffable? How far can words go to describe visual phenomena, and can those words in the end give enough information?

Another part of the Sacks article that I found interesting was Sacks' willingness to incorporate all sorts of angles into his investigation of Sue's vision, that is, not simply looking at how her eyes or brain functions but also considering unexpected, abstract objects like will power and desire. Sue writes in her letter to Sacks about how she always, almost subconsciously, wanted to see in more depth. Sacks responds to this, "Was it possible that the intensity of this wish had made her believe that she was seeing in stereo when she actually was not?" This readiness to consider other aspects like emotion and conviction make Sacks' musings intriguing if inconclusive.

Additionally, I want to draw attention to the craziness that is the response Sacks got from Shimojo about the variation of binocular and monocular balance in individuals...I think the idea that the brain takes an average and dubs sit good enough is a bit of betrayal on my brain's part. Are my eyes lying to me? How different is the world I see from the world my friend sees? How much more or less depth do I enjoy in my visual field? In any case, I'm glad my binocular vision developed during my critical period, when it was supposed to!

Just Some Thoughts and Stories

I was reading the Michael Morgan article and was interested in the idea of living your life with only one eye. I was Particularly attracted because my great aunt who is 93 years old, has lived most of her adult life with only her right eye. She drove around South Jersey until about five years ago. On a visit we were driving around south jersey and my mom was driving and my aunt was giving her directions. She kept having my mom make right turns. It became obvious to us that we were driving almost in circles and going out of our way. We realized this was because when she was driving she could turn to her right to see but would have to turn her whole head to the left to gather enough information to make a left turn. On the way home my mom drove a more direct way and my aunt was totally lost. She became confused and thought we were heading in the wrong direction. All the little things and traditions she did to compensate became apparent to us. She would move her head slightly to the side to judge depth. One might have never figured out that she strutted a glass eye until she lost it once... but that's another story…

I was listening to the NPR story and I put my finger in front of my face trying to figure out what she meant by "not seeing space". I always cross my eyes and have intrigued by the multiplication of the images I then see. I also cross my eyes knowing how silly I look and love it. I started to see what she meant by not seeing space. It almost felt like taking a picture and focusing on one image while the background appears blurry. The other day I took some pictures playing with my camera and focused on different on parts of the scene. In first picture (below) I focused on my friend who was close to me and the other on the people and landscape in the distance. It seemed to me that Susan saw the world like the first photo with the closest things in focus and the world around out of focus and blurry.

Binding Vision

Sorry that this is a wee late! I was a little thrown by the schedule due to Spring break and didn't realize it's already my turn until I went to post a comment! Anyway. Here goes.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte features the notion that it is the retina, rather than the painting, that creates the light and effects of ocolor and depth. One of Seurat’s main interests in his color theories is to address and understand the forming of the image. He invented a color theory surrounding a law of contrast where color achieves maximum intensity once brought closest to its complementary, creating an optical unification in the viewer’s eyes at a given distance. With the use of modern scientific thought Seurat believed that the theory assured his predecessors’ (The Impressionists) close attention to light and color, rendering colors more vibrant than standard brushes.

A clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off depicts pointillism's binding physical and visual effect quite well, also demonstrates the scale and dimensions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNMXbeaKeak

The repeated dots is an excellent example of the illusion of depth through the repetition of a pattern as well as the persistence of vision that accounts for a fusion of a new vibrant color between dots of pure color. The flickering dots bind the viewer's vision, activating a stereoscopic view through pure color contrast. In the painting each adjacent dot is another image, causing the two eyes to oscillate between the two. The scientifically achieved painterly effects uses the engagement on a physiological level to short circuit the painting's implicit social criticism.

The scientific and methodical manner in which the dots are applied and their presence once implemented in an artwork seem to erase originality, an end impressionism earnestly sought to reach in the movement’s spontaneous renderings of moments in nature. This undeniable aspect of homogeneity and depersonalization found in paintings produced by different artists who relied on the common method was so imposing that at the first opening between Seurat, Pissaro, and Signac, visitors were unable to distinguish one artist’s work from the other. In implementing a new color theory and a new method of rendering images as a continuation of impressionists’ studies in light and color, Seurat championed the modernist ideal to isolate form from the fiction of the painting. The isolation between form and fiction is quite literal. These dots were in fact stacked on top of a finished painting. The human figures appear to be caricatural, rendering the subjects critically in the stiff, cutout like imaging overemphasizes class difference that percolate under a screen of equalized dots. The rower in the foreground is strikingly different to the uptight top hatted gentleman. The corsetry to suggest women's fashions is also exagarrated.. The sardonic portrayal of the bourgeoisie, mirrored the socio-political milieu brewing in the last quarter century of France. In this endeavor he challenged the laws of legibility upheld at the time. Salon paintings entailed clear relationships and social, economic, and moral hierarchies. These lines are decisively blurred in La Grande Jatte by the facture, causing the painting to veer towards anarchy.

This overlay of modernist, scientific technique, which sits atop a traditional promenade schema, is an aesthetic blurring between old and new forms and styles that disrupts the painting's fiction of a utopic union of classes along the Seine. The painting is shrouded by a cloud of equality that is not actually present in the society. This ethereal mist is unnerving and through a contrapuntal application of egalitarian dots, anti-utopian aspects of democratization, urbanity, and industry emerges from the fragmentation. The reality is there is no mobility. The stiff silhouettes alludes not to heroism, but the restrictive social stratification industry perpetuated under capital.

a life of photographs

I was incredibly engaged while reading the Sacks story about Stereovision. Sacks tells the story of a woman named Sue who was born cross eyed. After three surgeries she was able to gain control over the direction of her eyes, but still the two retinas did not create a stereoscopic vision of the world. Instead, Sue saw the world flat and without space. Although, as explained by Sacks, and Livingstone as well, this lack does expand one’s peripheral vision, it also makes everything seem flat. When I try picturing it I imagine seeing the world in front of me as almost a photograph I am always unable to enter. Sue saw the world in this way, although she was still able to intellectually understand what she was missing from her vision. Through this understanding she was still able to interact in the 3D world in a way that wasn’t noticeable to others and manage motor skills.
Towards the end of the article Sue explains how once she was learned to exercise her eyes to work as two separate retinas while still working together. She describes seeing snow for the first time in 3D, how she saw every snow flake individually and wrote “. In the past, the snow would have appeared to fall in a flat sheet in one plane slightly in front of me. I would have felt like I was looking in on the snowfall. But now, I felt myself within the snowfall, among the snowflakes.” It seems so disturbing and upsetting; the inability to penetrate the scenery of your own life. I am curious to know how stereovision could potentially effect people in their perceptions of self, others and social interaction. When I imagine myself in Sue’s beginning position I immediately feel removed from the world and my surroundings. Sometimes when I have a moment of anxiety I take a moment to feel/observe myself in my surroundings with the hopes of grounding myself. I wonder how this would look different to a person with monocular vision… I would imagine that there is almost a part of you that always feels a bit disconnected from scenery or persons. Also, if I saw the world monocularly, I would find it odd to touch things. How would it be to hold someone’s hand? If there hand looks flat, how would it feel to cup it within yours? Furthermore, I am curious about how motor skills are affected when one’s vision is unable to properly determine the depth of an object. When we reach for an object our brain identifies the object and then sends messages from our brain to our hand to determine how to sufficiently pick-up the object. For a person who is unable to see the object in 3D, I would imagine this is quite challenging.
Last night my grandfather and I went to see an awful movie in 3D. Having just read Sack’s article on “Stereo Sue” I began paying close attention to the experience of watching a 3D film versus a more typical flat version. It was interesting to notice that when fast paced action happened while wearing the glasses I felt it much more challenging to take in all the information on the screen. I had to keep my eyes focused in a singular position for a moment to gain a cohesive image, and then would spend a bit of time getting grounded in another segment. Ultimately, I felt that I missed a lot. It is almost like an exaggerated version of how we do not have as great peripheral vision as Sue did while seeing the world flat. My grandfather complained that he couldn’t see anything while having the glasses on, and found it much easier to see images with the glasses off for the entirety of the film.

Visual Reality

I was interested in how our method of perceiving 3-d space is somewhat sloppily stitched together from many different mechanisms. It makes sense that our brain would analyze a number of factors within our visual field and synthesize them to create a perception. However, the analysis of these factors can be so ill-defined that sometimes they conflict with each other. In any given visual situation, certain factors overpower others. It is rare to process an image with equal attention to all of its aspects. Perception is not defined by the results of any standard process. Instead, it is highly adaptive which means it cannot be grounded by any default.

This adaptivity is highly advantageous, of course. It is what allows people who live in dense jungles, and those who are restricted to monocular vision to function. But it also robs them of their sense of reality. While they have constructed a reality of their own, the jungle inhabitants cannot understand the view of a far off mountain and Sue was shocked to understand the definition of space. Our perception of the world through visuals is in no way tethered to its reality. It does not take long for our visual perceptions to rearrange our perception of reality given their stimuli as shown by Oliver Sacks' anecdote about his post surgical visual phenomena.

I was very struck by the part of the Conway-Livingstone article in which they discuss our acceptance of paintings with incongruous forms or shadows. We are ready to accept these changes, and though they are unnatural abominations, they don't bother us much. Conway and Livingstone explain that this may be caused by the fact that unnatural things don't happen in nature and distinguishing them is therefore an undeveloped and unimportant trait. This may be true to some extent. But constant exposure to specific lighting and spacial conditions and exclusion from others will quickly and effectively change the "reality" of perceiving space and objects.

It may be important for humans to be ignorant of the existence of their version of reality in order to focus and adapt to be successful. Perhaps it is our disregard for reality that separates us from animals. The lives of animals are closely linked to reality. Their existence is based on realistic necessities that need to be accomplished such as food and shelter. Meanwhile, we are preoccupied with other, more subjective activities. In order to think, and to create we must be able to divorce ourselves from reality and live in a perception. Our tendency for diverse visual experiences may be part of a larger list of attributes that make up our humanity.

Seeing in Stereo and Other Thoughts

This weeks readings brought to mind an anecdote about an acquaintance of mine: after seeing a 3D movie in theaters (with much-improved technology since Tussauds’s “House of Wax”), he took off the glasses and said “I wish the world could be in 3D.” We all laughed at him, thinking that the world is, of course, already in 3D. But the joys of someone like Sue, who experiences stereopsis for the first time, very well did feel that longing for her vision to produce three dimensionality. And, of course, Sacks mentions how the process can go the opposite way, and how Paul Romano lost recognition of objects, as well of a sense of spatial orientation when he suffered an ocular hemorrhage in one eye.

Sacks’s own memoir of losing stereopsis after his stint in a recovery room was fascinating to me; we have all of course experienced changes in vision after reading for an extended period of time or starting at a computer screen, but to lose something as huge as stereoscopy (and related spatial judgement) after a fairly brief period of time (three weeks) was frightening, in a way. I shared Sacks’s wonder about prisoners and people living in dense rain forests who judged mountaintops as within arms length.

Her wonder and excitement at her new ability to see also paralleled my experience upon first getting glasses for my near-sightedness that had gone unnoticed until I was a sophomore in high school. When I put them on, I looked around, immediately noticing all the fine details of the world around me that I hadn’t questioned as blurry, like the edges of leaves that made up a green of a tree. I could so fully relate to Sue’s joy at finally seeing the levels of a three-dimensional world, just I rejoiced at being able to see crystal-clear details of things that were far away.

In terms of artwork, this creates another interesting paradox. Livingstone comments on the fact that finely detailed pieces of art provide a good stimulus for stereoscopic depth perception, and thus stereopsis provides a strong signal that the painting is flat, rather than three-dimensional. To remedy this effect, Leonardo da Vinci recommended closing one eye and standing a distance from the painting, to remove those cues and allow the viewer to see the monocular depth cues without interference from the “flatness” of the painting. (I grew up around artists and often saw this tactic used, but had little idea what it did until now!) The Conway and Livingstone article hypothesizes that artists, Rembrandt being an example, were more likely to be strabismic than non-artists, allowing them to use monocular depth cues to a greater extent.

Conversely, Livingstone writes in her book that paintings without fine detail, such as Impressionist works, do not invoke a strong signal from stereopsis to convey that the painting is flat. Other depth cues can then give the illusion of three-dimensionality. This effect can be exploited to a greater extent by the coarse dabs of paint that are present in many such paintings. The mismatch of these dabs between the two eyes can create a strong sense of three-dimensional volume which is filled with small floating objects (just as Sue eventually saw the noctiluca and the snow).

In line with Conway and Livingstone claim that Rembrandt and other artists may be strabismic or lack stereoscopic vision, I was really fascinated by the fact that children with autism had greater success with overcoming cognitive biases and drawing objects realistically. This section of the article reminded me of our conversation about the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which in effect works to overcome many of these cognitive biases by isolating aspects of the drawing, drawing upside down, etc. This allows children with autism to draw objects as they see them, without interjecting their knowledge about the three-dimensional shape of the object (this knowledge itself may not even be present or relevant to the child with autism). The authors go on to say that these drawings rarely have a single point perspective, and change perspectives based on consistency for a local region or object in the scene.

To finish my thoughts, here is a cute video from a movie I used to watch all the time as a child, The Thief and the Cobbler. While not wholly relevant to this week’s readings, it is certainly relevant to the concepts of three-dimensionality, and the reorganization of space based on interruptions of our assumptions. It’s quite short, and has an M.C. Escher-like quality to it.

Enjoy! Thief and the Cobbler Video

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