refocusing, reconstructing, the Mona Lisa

In a previous psychology class I have taken the professor made a very strong point of explaining that while many people think of the eyes as like cameras and the brain like a super-computer, they were indeed very mistaken. I loved reading the way that Solso an Livingstone explain how the eye, primary visual cortex, receptors, and brain work - I also found both of their explanations very accessible, which is not always the case. I really found the explanation of how and why the homo sapien brain evolved in the way that it did, especially because I have been wondering why only a very small portion of light is in the spectrum that is visible to humans.

Each of us sees so much every day, I find it hard to step back and think about the process going on inside my head, and also hard to think about vision in general objectively - I cannot even imagine what it would be like to not be able to experience the world through vision, to be not be able to see color, or be 'colorblind' and not be able to distinguish between some colors. I liked Solso's point that everything is first perceived by early sensory receptors that are shared bt all humans, and then are subjected to the individuals perspective. As light enters the eye it goes through transformation after transformation, and is re-represented in many different ways - there is also a huge amount of visual information that is sloughed off in this process. It only makes sense that each of us would end up 'seeing' the world in different ways, since no persons brain is the same and it seems impossible that all brains would process visual information in the same way.

Another point Solso (and Livingstone as well I believe) makes is that the eye is constantly refocusing. Even when you think you are staring at one spot, the eye moves many times very quickly every second and what you see is an impression made up from a large number of individual fixations. When you look at a piece of art, for example, it is impossible to see it as a whole. As soon as the eye focuses on one area of the piece of art it quickly moves on to another and another - it is almost impossible to see a piece of art the same way that someone else sees it. The brain reconstructs visual impressions and adds in information from other areas of the brain. Without conscious control the brain adds interpretations, biases, memories, impressions, former knowledge to the visual stimulus. What one person 'sees' will be utterly different from what another 'sees' because they are drawing from different knowledge bases and totally different experiences and perspectives.

One last thing, I loved the discussion of the Mona Lisa in Livingstone chapter 5. I thought it was very interesting to attempt to look at a piece of art with no bias or previous feeling of it, that seems like an impossibility to me. But Livingstone claims to have done so, and the discussion of being unable to catch her smile by looking at it was fascinating! I spent a long time trying to focus on other parts of the painting and see if she was smiling more than when I looked at her face directly. I am not sure if I like the idea that her allure can be defined by the focus in the fovea and the mild blurring in the rest of the eye, but its a fantastic explination of why no one can ever catch her smile