It is difficult to articulate oneself after confronted with such a surfacing of material on visual perception. I feel it is a surfacing material because it reveals an inner dialogue that exists intuitively outside of conventions. It is material not only applicable to our individual ways of seeing (I cannot help now but be distracted by the forces of balance and shape on visual perception), but resonant as a larger matrix registered from the layers of social convention and intuitive priors. From Form As Figuring It Out, Stafford draws our attention to the reflections of the parallel disciplines of neuroscience and humanities that have until relatively recent remained as such parallels. However, within each shifting reflection Stafford reveals, “the modern dynamics of being are indelibly etched from the history of the system.” Illustrating further upon this idea is Vico’s concept of verum factum, which is the principle that ‘the true (verum) and the made (factum) are convertible’, so that we can only know for certain that which we have created. Stafford reasons that kinds of formal order- symbolism, dreams, rituals- are only intelligible to us because other human beings made them. Thus, the natural sciences can only yield approximate truths based on our attempts to imitate nature in experiments, whereas the human sciences offer exact knowledge because societies are our own creations. It is within this framework that art and neuroscience begin to reveal the hidden interior of our intuitive and instinctive ways of visual perception.

Stafford writes, “Art as cognitive imagery can be seen to shadow forth certain underlying truths about brain function that we still intuitively recognize today.” From Arnheim, we are introduced to such “underlying truths,” from the way in which we understand the affect of color, size, and spatial depth upon the weight of an object to our predilection for left to right movement. Arnheim is very much aware of the influence of the past, by admitting that the “interaction between the shape of the present object and that of things in the past is not automatic and ubiquitous, but depends upon whether a relation is perceived between them.” But how do we reveal the beginning of these relational perceptions? In a similar stance, Stafford takes the position of the Romantic and asks, “how does art…enable us to detect the cognitive apparatus of its original creators” and “what makes people persist in replaying formal categories handed down to them from the distant past?” These questions are indeed provoking and Stafford acknowledges the understanding that “creating, feeling, and decision-making functions some how ride atop biological systems that operate largely beyond our awareness.”