Over the years, I have devoted considerable thought to how I see. Sometimes I spot things that no one around me does. Sometimes I can make out things further away than usual. At others, I mistake my wife for a hat. No, not exactly. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks, is a well-written series of case studies of neurological disorders, including several on how the brain processes visual information. When I say that I mistake my wife for a hat, I mean that occasionally my brain misinterprets visual data so that I that I think I am seeing things that I am not actually seeing. By this, I do not mean hallucinations, which are completely fabricated in the brain, but rather simple mistakes in the visual cortex.
Over the past week, I have put even more thought into this. I have realized that what is is much more than what my eyes see. Some part of my brain is constantly stitching together many different things to produce images. Memories, intuition and input from all my senses form the basis of wht I see. When I read, my eyes tend to catch the first few and last few letters of each word. For longer words, that leaves a jumble in the middle that my mind fills in by interpolation. Context and intuition have served me well here. This system works much more often then not. Every once in a while, this does not work, occasionally resulting in some amusing Mad Libs, and I need to take a closer look. I often mangle unusual words, especially names, often leaving myself unable to spell, never mind pronounce, these words properly.
I have come to realize that this interpolation is part of my whole visual process. This is broadly true of everyone, but, in my case, my brain relies much less on input from my optical nerves and much more on intuition and memory than those with unimpaired vision. When I visit new places, I often find myself making a circuit of the place, looking at everything closely and making a mental map. This is not just a regular map, but a detailed visual map. Like Google Maps with the terrain option and Street View enabled, my mental map automatically zooms in to fill in details my eyes miss. What my brain does not find stored in the memory banks, it fills in with its best educated guess. What sounds and whose voices can I hear? Have I seen someone wearing that color today? Occasionally, I will ask a strange woman a question in public if she is wearing something similar to what my wife is wearing. That must come from my mind making assumptions, in this case incorrect, based on whatever details it gets from my optic never.
I am not sure what, if anything, this speculation means. It does help me think about my photography a bit. The image I intend to make when I click the shutter is not the image in front of me, but rather the one I have constructed inside my head. If I can improve my process of constructing images in my head, either by using non-visual cues more efficiently or by finding ways to control my subjects and their environment, then I can improve both the images I make and the efficiency with which I make them, that is to say a higher percentage of better quality shots at the end of the day.
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If your peripheral vision is like mine, you can probably detect motion without really seeing the moving object, I love how I can still see certain birds whose flight patterns I learned as a kid – turkey vultures, kingfishers, American goldfinches, and yes, even flickers.
[...] This project has inspired me to some thinking. The has resulted in a few upcoming blog posts, including this one, Stitching Sight – Why What I See is Not What I See. [...]