Two-way Street between Seeing and Thinking

Vision shaped by mind which in turn is affected by what one sees

“Attention directs perception just as perception influences attention: the sensory array and its corresponding brain centers are in near-constant communication with one another and signals go both ways.”

Eve (ebook page 157) by Cat Bohannon

While this quote comes from a book about female bodies evolving, and male ones by comparison, this observation about the mutual influence of eye on the mind and the other way around fits well with the blog theme here about seeing things and stepping back to find parallels to thinking about things, too. A familiar folk belief is that the eyes present a window to the person’s soul; that is, sustained gazing at the person, directly in the eye, may offer clues to the innermost person, bypassing the superficial impression created by clothing, hairstyle, speech habits and other status markers. Probably Rob Walker‘s 2019 book, The Art of Noticing, dwells on exercises and examples to improve habits of mind so that more of the surrounding world and one’s experience in it will become more noticeable; powers of observation will grow. But the other side of the relationship may get overlooked on those pages –how the things we note or deem significant can also shape the habits of mind when venturing into the world: GIGO, garbage in garbage out and the reverse, beauty in and beauty out, perhaps.

By extension to all senses, the Aristotelian big five, but also the many other kinds of perceptual system in one’s world, too, perhaps what is on one’s mind affects how things smell, taste, sound, and feel to the touch. And the reverse: perhaps what elements of sound, touch, taste and smell (along with sights) that comprise one’s own particular waking experience also have an affect on what fills one’s mind and the imaginings one foresees (or fails to foresee). If any part of this two-way street is true, then the hopeful interpretation is that striving for a better surrounding experience –by serendipity, mindfulness, or by design– can have a positive result in one’s heart and mind. At the same time, though, a pessimistic consequence of the mutual effects of exterior experience and interior world is that cycles of bad things happening seem to beget more; a kind of “circling the drain” absence of hope once begun in this downward spiral.

Returning to the visual experience of moving through one’s surroundings and a lifetime of days and years, just as photography comes from the words “writing with light,” so too the roots of meaning for visual experience lying in things seen (and therefore thought about) more generally; of one’s eyes and visual cortex to make sense of the colors, textures, geometry and other patterns, along with patterns of light and shadow: seeing one’s world can appear more or less the same for people bringing very different life experiences to the moment. But things can carry very different meanings, too. Some fixate on one thing, others dwell on another. The gaze of some will rest on one subject while others will bounce from subject to subject before arriving at something stirring curiosity, giving relief from unpleasant things, or signifying something meaningful in the eye of that particular person –right now, from long-ago times, or envisioning possible futures there. Like the Rashomon Effect (or Hamlet before that), the same sequence of events can take on different meanings in the eye of one beholder compared to another. Even for the same person, when revisiting a place or a picture from a particular moment, as life experience accumulates the larger meaning of the place or event recorded may look different to its original meaning. Ditto when rereading a book, seeing a movie again, or listening to a song or poem once more. Scriptures (from Bible, for example) are considered a “living” word since the same ink on paper can reveal different meanings or emphasis when a person engages with it early in life, midway, or later on in life.

All together the two-way street of eye to environment to one’s thoughts (identifying, recognizing, tying to memories, or passing over something that once seemed important on another occasion) is a pulsing, living thing. Photowalking demonstrates how different camera friends stop to compose very different records of the day’s perambulating. On the one hand it can be frustrating to admit that a subject or scene is not fixed with meanings all can see. But on the other hand, knowing that one’s own eye and therefore mind can change is a refreshing escape from a prison of interpretation; a cage of verbal bars.

Filtered vision to see things differently

Examples that filter the light coming to eye or photo sensor. Imagine other sorts of augmented vision!

It is easy to make the leap from optical filter on lens or tinting available for (sun)glasses to a person’s vision of the world intellectually, emotionally, or optically. There is the well-known saying of seeing a situation “through rose-colored spectacles,” for instance, which means that the person views everything in glowing, cheerful terms no matter how dire the circumstances. Perhaps the reverse of this colorized experience is the process of substituting the color data in a digital photo for a (16-shade) grayscale picture, very much with the same emotional effect as one made in monochrome on black and white film: muting the immersive, life-like character of full-color for the abstraction of shades of gray that the mind can absorb with emphasis on geometry, light and shadow, and moment of shutter release to complete the finished composition.

In the age of Internet as seen in the experiment from Google Labs’ Google Glass, there is the field of Augmented Reality in which data is layered onto the surrounding scene in a sort of heads-up display (HUD) so that the person can identify things there, and then almost instantly view augmented information about the particular subject by drawing from Wikipedia and search engines online. Taking this approach of mediated, enhanced visual experience one can imagine other sorts of filtering of the total (cultural, biological, geological) information landscape; something like the portable multi-function tool used by characters in the TV show, “Star Trek,” called a Tri-corder.

Imaging a filter that makes gravity (mass) or lifespan (building or creature) or wind speeds visible.

There is seemingly no limit to the sorts of filters to imagine: x-ray vision to look for weak points in a bridge, heat sensor to see living things or energy leaks of buildings, gravity meter to show visually the locations and subjects with more attraction pulling than their surroundings, magnet filters to reveal ferrous materials, electrical filter to show streams of electrons, and so on. With regard to the meaning of seeing things with one filter or another it is not so much a revelation of the many ways that biological eyesight can be enhanced and extended, but rather the realization that even before putting on a pair of colored lenses each person already is biased in some way or another. Looking at oneself in the metaphorically mirror, it is worth looking into what sorts of visual and intellectual and emotional filters color one’s own view of the world and, indeed, the view of one’s own self and place in the larger landscape.

So the next time you reach for a camera to compose the frame and capture the subject, consider what is filtered as it comes into the lens – either amplified (blue? amber? polarized light?) or muted. Moreover, consider your own mind’s filter and your “eye” for composition: by reviewing the pattern of pictures that you take and subjects that draw your attention (your own shots or “fave” images shared online by others) perhaps the overarching filter to your way of seeing and thinking will come into focus.