Vision: Part iv

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 Lastly, here’s an observation I have made as a non-musician. Beethoven was obsessed I think, taken over by relatively simple themes and melodies which would consume him and this one can see in his music.   These it would appear, went round and round in his head,  creating an explosion of emotion.  Everyone’s familiar with the rather simple theme in the “Ode to Joy” and how it builds through repetition in the finale of the Ninth Symphony.  A similar theme had been in Beethoven’s brain for years before that expressed in his Fantasia written considerably earlier. Most of us mortals may hum or whistle a tune and then leave it alone.   We can let go of a simple melody after a while. There’s the wonderful “Sanctus” of his Missa Solemnis too, led by the violin and soloists that develops into a thing of beauty. And this violin theme is very similar to the main theme of the first movement of his violin concerto.  His music is full of such examples.  Beethoven was easily obsessed and consumed by simple themes in much of his music, some of which  almost seem never ending. Indeed it seems to me that once a good idea came into his mind, he had a problem getting it out.   Less interference or distraction from outside sounds and noises might contribute but such obsession, it would appear is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity, a pretext for high concentration of effort.   You can say the same about other music.  Just a couple of examples: Janacek’s iterations of two or three notes and of course,  Tchaikovsky’s emotional crescendos built on simple “answering” or repetition of themes by one part of the orchestra,   then another until an emotional apotheosis is attained.  Given that creation is in many cases an obsession, it is reasonable to ask whether the rest of us too easily give up on a theme without seeing its true intrinsic beauty or without being able to develop it fully.

 

We have seen that on a physiological basis, sensory deprivation is analogous to denervation hypersensitivity.   It may increase one’s response to residual sensory stimuli in such a way as to result in an exuberant response, an exuberantly painful response or more often flowering of the imagination or even cause a retreat into one’s inner world and hallucination.  Alternately, one may learn to confabulate, in other words to make something that is not out of an incomplete picture that is there and there may be one cause of an hallucination or illusion.  How is it that we can see something that is not really there?  Why do we see something that does not exist?

 

     Receiving stations stand ready to receive input whether there is any input or not.  These receiving stations may be disconnected from their inputs and hence unaware that input is curtailed.  Anosognosia, unawareness of a disease or problem, is the result.  Being unaware that you are blind (Anton’s syndrome)  is but one example but there are other related problems that come from the sudden end of basic sensory input in the brain. Unusual visual phenomena occur in migraine, and persistence of visual imagery or palinopsia that occur because again the receiving neurons are still there to receive input even though they may be receiving nothing. A visual afterimage persists long after it is gone for some people who have had damage to the occipital lobe.  Ordinarily an object shown in the blind visual field say on the right side with a right hemianopsia will persist in the preserved visual field.  Patients with occipital lobe damage frequently make more of an image than is actually there.  This happens a lot when a small part of their vision is preserved.  They may see a certain form, say that of a person in their affected visual field and then when they turn their eyes in a way that they can more easily see, they find out the person is not there.  Most of them don’t seem to mind this problem too much, but they mention it.

 

MIND SENSES WHAT THE EYE CANNOT SEE:

     You can understand how we see what is not there.  It is harder to explain how we can see what our visual systems were not designed to see.  I was teaching my third grade son about the color spectrum.  I happened to mention that the spectrum we see is only a very small part of the waves that are out there. Ultraviolet and infrared waves that border the visible spectrum are invisible to the naked eye, but the really interesting wavelengths are so far from visible light and don’t generate heat so that we can’t sense them at all, radio waves, x-rays and gamma rays.  Trying to explain to a curious eight year old how we know about things our bodies can’t sense, that our eyes were not designed to see,  is a job. 

 

     One way we know these certain invisible waves are there is through instruments designed to pick them up, not the least of which is our table radio and television set, that an eight year old can understand. They also fit into our theories about what light is.  If we have a wave of a certain wavelength, why shouldn’t there be waves of a shorter or longer wavelength?   But there is something quite profound here.  It took tens of thousands of years of human history to understand the meaning of the light that impinges on our eyes, by this I mean to appreciate visible light as just a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Actually we learned about what light really is only recently and of course we still have a lot to learn about light.

 

     We all know what some of these insights were starting perhaps when Isaac Newton’s prism which separated out all the colors from white light, then to the speculations about the wave nature of light, that the various colors differed from each other only in terms of wavelength and frequency, later the discovery of invisible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, the invention of various instruments, radios, Geiger counters, x-ray detectors, that could respond to invisible electromagnetic waves, finally to instruments and detectors that could generate images from parts of the spectrum that we could not see.   Every time you take an x-ray, from a simple chest x-ray to a CAT scan, you are making an image using invisible rays, and astronomers make radio frequency, IR , gamma ray images from doubly invisible objects.  Not only are they too far away and too small in our sky for our eyes to see, but they also radiate energy within invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Quasars are invisible and far away.  The most distant quasar is felt to be up to 13 Billion light years away[i], which means we are receiving electromagnetic radiation (here in radio frequencies) old enough to have been sent shortly after the birth of the universe. Their energy comes to us from the farthest reaches of the universe and a time only shortly after the birth of the cosmos. Certain very distant galaxies that powerful telescopes can sense help to tell us about the early history of the cosmos.  In looking at them, we are peering into the farthest reaches of time and space. This is because they are billions of light years away and hence the electromagnetic energy that we sense is extraordinarily old, in some cases billions of years old, so we see these quasars and galaxies as they were when their energy set out on its journey to us. These very distant objects have passively sent messages to us, but we have had to invent great instruments for seeing.

 

     When the Hubble telescope went up in 1990 the first thing that came to my mind was the  biblical Tower of Babel and man’s hubris in making something that would reach into realms he had no business going or knowing anything about.  “Whoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be in the hereafter.” (Mishnah)  When the Hubble telescope malfunctioned I was certain it was due to some divine intervention.  Are we exploring  where we have no right to go?  We are breaking out of our limiting structures in many areas simultaneously.  This applies to biology as well as physics.  Should we be redesigning  animals and plants for our own purposes? In every instance so far,  just as we are convinced we’ve reached and ultimate understanding,  we discover that our line of sight is limited and there is always a lot more to learn.[ii]  Near the turn of the century the man who measured the speed of light, Albert Michaelson said in a fit of hubris, that physics had discovered the basic laws of the universe[iii], expressing his disappointment that there was little more to do.  A few short years after, Einstein published on the special theory of relativity unifying our ideas of time and space.  It seemed to me that we might just be exploring a realm God might not want us to know about. that maybe there was a reason why the Hubble telescope had failed to work. We were building things to stretch into a world where we didn’t belong. Or, maybe I was just kidding myself into thinking such exploration was more fundamental or basic than it actually is.  We always turn out to be more ignorant than we give ourselves credit for!

 

Figure 1: An Array of Radio telescopes[iv]. A series of moving parabolic reflectors generates an image from radio frequency wave stellar emissions that is similar to a conventional telescope.

 

      A lot of books about neurology describe how we see what we can see.  But they fall short in describing those things that are way beyond the capacity of our visual systems to see, but somehow we manage to see anyway.  To me this is the most profound part of that way we see.  Every time we look at an x-ray image, hear a radio, use ultraviolet light, we step beyond our biological capacities into the realm of human invention.  The vision we inherit is miraculous enough.  There are worlds beyond that we’ve discovered well beyond the reach of our biological systems and their advanced design.  Did you ever wonder why we can see well beyond what our organism was designed to see?  This is accomplished at higher abstract levels in the association cortex of the brain, that is those areas not involved primarily with basic sensory reception or muscle movements, in other words thought and motivation which is hardly taken into account in various neurology or neurobiology texts.    Because the function of these areas of the brain isn’t as readily “visible” or easily accessible to examination, that is the workings of the association cortex are less manifest in behavioral observation or testing for sensory reception, our conception of how association cortices works is vague.  But we have a strong hint at the function of these brain areas when we become aware of all we have accomplished that is well beyond the bounds of our basic sensory and motor apparatuses.  What I mean here is that it’s fine to describe how we walk and maintain balance.  We can run also at a certain speed and over a certain terrain that is far surpassed by many other animals.  Few men can run a mile in as little as four minutes under the best of circumstances.  This is our biological endowment.   On the other hand, at this stage in the twentieth century machines that increase this capacity are abundant, from all wheel drive vehicles that let us surpass the fastest predators of the African plain to automobiles and airplanes.  We’ve gone well beyond our biological endowments and this is on a very practical level and we’ve done so utilizing our association cortex, whose machinations have been little described physiologically.  It’s fine for us to follow the electrical impulses carrying visual information to the brain, but much more difficult to trace the thought processes physiologically connected with the understanding of light as electromagnetic radiation or the design of instruments that increase our traveling speed.

 

 

Figure 2: The visible spectrum accounts for only a very small portion of the electromagnetic waves that we are aware of and utilize every day. We are not stultified by the eye's abilities.

 

 

     Visual impulses, after arrival at the visual or primary sensory cortex in the occipital lobe,  spread rapidly to secondary and tertiary sensory cortices then after that, ramify widely.  As these impulses spread they are harder to define and follow and the pathway is less stereotyped and varies from subject to subject, particularly if the person is involved in a complex task involving multiple brain areas.  We learn this, not primarily through lesioning experiments that can only show us how certain capacities become limited when brain regions are removed,  but more through physiologic experiments.  The PET scan SPECT, and certain MRIY techniques now allow us to visualize increased metabolism in specific brain regions, over time and in response to specific stimuli.  And different persons, different groups of people, men vs. Women for example, or normals vs. Stroke patients, may employ different anatomic strategies in order to accomplish the same task.  One study showed men and women using different halves of the brain to perform the same nonsense syllable rhyming task.  Men and women were equally skilled at the task but men tended to use mostly their left hemisphere whereas women employed both the left and right hemisphere indicating as is well known that cerebral dominance for language is expressed more strongly in men than it is in women.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3: Man's vision extends well beyond his biological limitations into micro and macro worlds[v].[vi] 

 

     So the question of how our brain and mind functions becomes even more fundamental.  Given that we’ve already achieved a level of function that far surpasses our biological endowments as far a perception, and motor function are concerned, that we now live in a situation resembling little our original biological beginnings perhaps as a ground primate in a grassland in Africa, are biological, physiological neurological concepts going to prove to be adequate to explain the whole range of human behavior, or should we perhaps be looking at something more?

 

     A lot of our abilities are no longer in our brain or in our bodies.  We’ve externalized our abilities and hence much of ourselves.  Much of ourselves is non-biological, but not material either; what we are is much harder to define.  Our common memory is stored as data and is manipulated and manipulates and affects us through instruments of our own design, computers as well as other recording machines. Just as our machines extend our maximal velocity from a mile in 4 minutes, memory is extended with magnetic and optical storage devices, our ability to calculate which is slow and unreliable is magnified thousands of times.  Biology ceases to define us for our  abilities are extended by  external tools.  The most  that  can be said is that the best brain takes account of some of this,  certainly it can’t appreciate or apprehend all of the information we generate, but then may serve some executive function or other.   Ultimately, we think, we are in control.  Our abilities are leveraged so through external contrivances that we see much more than one would have thought we ever could see given our visual system, that is attuned only to a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum at only limited intensities. We see so much farther, smaller, larger than we should be able to.

 

     Mankind has long ago left his biology in the dust. That’s precisely how we differ from all other animals that are forever bound by their biological endowments.  Biology does not constrain us.  Our biological instruments can see red green and blue, and vastest natural vistas of only a few miles, yet we’ve figured out how to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum and to the edges of the cosmos. This is not just a testimony to the genius of human kind.  We can pat ourselves on the back for having come so far in our development.  It is more than that, plain evidence that there is a driving force propelling us to achieve what is beyond our biological inheritance.   You have to ask, whether or not this will to go beyond what we is biologically determined or does it come from another less-defined source.  Has human will attained a life of its own?  We do not have a definite answer to this question since such a will is unprecedented in non-human animals.   Perhaps we’ve hit upon something that biology alone cannot account for.

 

     From our limited view of a nucleus of material reality of our day to day we have expanded our vista into the realm of the very small.  We take for granted now seeing things beyond our original capacity to see.  In the micro-world we can see a Paramecium or bacterium using an ordinary light microscope, or a virus particle utilizing electron microscopy, and even the structure of a large molecule with x-ray diffraction techniques.  All of these instruments have extended our horizons.  In even smaller realms we conceptualize the constituents of atoms, protons, neutrons electrons and constituents of protons and neutrons, the quark that is an abstract mathematical concept,  but yet a basic building block of matter. We learn that our material world is comprised primarily of empty space. And utilizing these mental tools we have begun to speculate about the beginnings of things the origin and the end of the universe, extending this horizon even further, well beyond the beginnings and ends of our own lifetimes.  Indeed every time we open a history book we are in a sense gazing beyond our own natural span of years.  What other animal can lay a claim of understanding of time before and after his own lifespan?

 

A REALITY MORE VAST THAN OUR IMAGINGS:

     The other side of this is our looking out to the stars into a cosmos vaster than our imaginations.  Only a few hundred years ago we speculated that heaven and hell lay just over and just under the surface of our earth, that we could happen into these imaginary realms by just traveling the surface of our planet. Now we peer out into the heavens using earth bound optical radio and gamma and x-ray telescopes and orbiting instruments trying to discover the ends of the universe and perhaps other life forms like ourselves.  How far can we see?  Because of the big bang the farthest objects we can examine are receding from us at the fastest speed.  Generally objects at the greatest distance from us are traveling away at enormous speed.  Our horizon that part of the universe we can see from our vantage point is limited.  If the universe is 10 to 12 billion years old, as it is felt to be, and we are seeing an object a billion light years away, the light (more properly electromagnetic energy - we may be looking at energy outside the “visible” part of the electromagnetic spectrum) 5 billion years old.  By the time we receive this light, the object in question will have moved at such high velocity much farther away and changed a great deal.  Indeed it may not even still exist.  And the light we are seeing was sent before the formation of our own planet some 4.5 billion years ago, sent before there was even any life to appreciate it.  How far can we see?  Using these facts, the speed of light and of recession of heavenly bodies, knowing our capacity to receive the faint signals from distant objects you can make certain calculations but it is clear the information that we get from the farthest reaches of universe is billions of years old (because that is how long it takes for it to arrive here)  and does  give us a “picture”  how things were then but not how they look today.  Recall that when this light was originally sent, there was no life here on earth, no earth or sun.  Our horizon is no where close to the edge of the universe, or near the beginning of time (if we take into consideration the age of light that we see at vast distances then we can apprehend the fundamental equivalence of time and distance.)

 

     According to our current understandings our visual horizon is not infinite, it is roughly calculable.  In general terms we can see the distance that light is able to travel since the universe began.   We can’t see further than x light years,  x being the age of the universe, what ever that age is and it is not definitely known  (perhaps around 12 billion years.)  A light year, the distance that light can travel in one year, is about 6 Trillion miles. It’s almost a given that information can never be transferred faster than the speed of light.  As we peer at objects further and further away we can see things as they were longer and longer ago. Since the universe, like us, is only getting older and older, it stands to reason that as it ages, our horizon gets wider and wider; we can see further, so that over time imperceptibly, more and more distant objects rise over our horizon.  By this time, these objects are so far away, that they are flying away from us at a speed, close to the speed of light.   If you could only see an object 10 or 12 billion light years away, then you could see things as they were at the beginning of time just after the big bang itself!!  But it doesn’t work that way of course.  Since galaxies are flying away from us the light dispatched from the most distant of galaxies was a lot closer to us at the time it was made and the velocity of recession has to be taken into calculations of arrival time in light years. There are finite limits of our sight, but they are not determined by the structure of our eyes or our nervous system.  The laws of physics limit our vision.

 

     The most important implication of Einstein’s relativity theory early in the twentieth century is that time and space are essentially equivalent concepts. No where is this point made more strongly than in consideration of visual horizons. Time and space may be taken as dimensions on a graph and are essentially equivalent from the standpoint of mathematics. Someone can locate me at this very moment as I sit a certain place in a physical universe by specifying my coordinates in a Cartesian system of axes over the continuum of space and time.  This is graphically represented below,(Figure 4) where time flows from the bottom to the top of the paper and is thus on the vertical axis and space is seen in two of its dimensions represented by a plane in a diagram that occurs at a certain time t.  As time passes represented along the axis from the bottom to the top of the paper, space occurs as a series of planes extending along its own axes.  One can locate an event in space and in time. 

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     Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  If an event is given as a point at a certain time t, then the distance that light travels over a future time higher up on the graph over the vertical axis can now be represented as a circle. Light cannot travel more than this distance over the period of time from t to t1 so it is impossible to see further than the distance represented by the circle.  As time passes and light is able to travel farther and farther, the ever expanding light circles describe a cone.  Our visual horizon has a mathematical limit as represented by this cone. An event outside the horizon cone cannot influence or be influenced by the event as depicted on the graphical diagramY . This is depicted in the figure by the separation of horizons of observers A and B. Never their twain shall meet. 

 

     You can represent a life on such a diagram with a limited capacity to see, limited only by the horizon as dictated by the speed of light which is an absolute, only the image of a life is a great deal fuzzier.  Instead of an event, which starts out as a point, a life extends slightly farther over the vertical axis of time and of course, we humans physically extend a certain distance out into space as well but better represented by the extent of our visual horizons rather than the width of our bodies.  Nevertheless the principle is the same. A life is a contiguous extension of perception, a vision over space and time axes, and may be graphically represented in same way as a physical event over the space-time continuum.  To find an ancestor or descendent one needs only to travel to their space-time coordinates, limited only by our technical ability to accomplish this and the absolute speed of light.

 

     One’s own life, the beginning and end of perception, can be revisited by a form of travel.  Space and time coordinates are mathematically and physically quite equivalent. Physical laws make no distinction here.  Now it is true as humans that we perceive space and time in a way that is different than their mathematical representation.   Time flows in our perception whereas space does not.  Events are perceived to be caused by previous events so that time is unidirectional whereas space is not.  Time will only flow for us from the bottom to the top of the page in our current representation and never the other way around. This is often referred to as the arrow of time.  Space has no such arrow.

 

     This presents one with an interesting conundrum for going according to mathematical representations, time is treated fundamentally different than the way we consciously think of it.  In math, the arrow of time can conceivable flow in either direction.  Going back in time is not a problem at all. Physical processes and events are reversible.  Why time flows ever forward from the mathematical perspective has only to do with the second law of thermodynamics which states that over time in a closed system, entropy or disorder increases, but this matter seems to me to be almost an insignificant footnote a limited explanation, given as almost an afterthought because some explanation is necessary to explain the forward arrow of time.  Otherwise as stated, space and time are exactly similar types of dimensions on physical axes. 

 

     To humans, time is fundamentally much more different than space coordinates.  It seems to me this bears on birth and death.  While we extend as a certain quantity of matter over limited spatial dimensions, our lives extend over time in a fundamentally different manner marked by a beginning, which is perhaps our conception or possibly our birth and an end, which is death.  It is not possible to revisit a life or an event in a life in the real world by going back in time.   This could violate causality, which seems to be also an absolute.  To travel through space, on the other hand is not a problem. One can revisit a place but not a life. 

 

     Since time is relatively equivalent to space in mathematical terms, the math, it seems to me, is at variance with common perception of time. Pure math seems inadequate in its handling of the concept of time despite the limited provisos of the second law of thermodynamics, which by my own common sense (take that for what it’s worth), do not seem to be a strong enough reflection of the human perception of time flows.  It seems to me a mathematical statement of time flux needs to be more consistent with human experience.   Why is this consideration so important?   Therein may lie an explanation of the mystery of life and death[vii]!! 

 

 

Figure 4[viii]: Astronomical distance horizons.  As time we can see more objects because their light has enough time to reach us. Time, meaning the age of the universe, is on the vertical axis and we are able to see over longer distances.

 

 

MUSICAL LITERACY:

     Legend has it that the young Mozart was capable of hearing a very long piece of music just once and then could reproduce the piece exactly.  After that, he could perhaps set it down on paper with the utmost fidelity.  Of course those of us who enjoy music at all, and that is most of us, commit certain songs and melodies to memory.  But there are two different styles of musical memory, different strategies used by the musically literate, those who can read and write music, and most others who are musically illiterate[ix].  It is not at all surprising that literate musicians, trained more classically, have a tendency to recall music literally, that is they often reproduce melodies and harmonies with precision, note for note.   In other words they have very highly trained and competent musical memories.  But after hearing a melody enough times, most people will start to be able to hum, sing or whistle the tune.  Most people after going to a concert or a Broadway show, that they like, end up singing or humming some of the tunes, but if we are not literate, chances are we won’t reproduce the music exactly.  Instead, what they pick up is the general shape of the melody, perhaps the alteration of going up and going down the scale particularly at a point in the piece that we like, but we can’t except in few cases, tell you exactly what you just heard.

 

     Neurological tests indicate that musical illiterates use mostly their right or non-dominant (non-language) hemisphere to function musically, but literate trained folks depend on linguistic processes in order to memorize and make music. In other words they tend to have a precise picture of a piece in terms of notes, rhythm and chords as if it were down in notation much as if you could memorize a Shakespeare soliloquy by seeing the print in your mind’s eye.  This goes against the popular belief that music resides or is taken care of by the more artistic or emotional right brain while math and scientific pursuits are handled by the left or language or analytical half of the brain. The real truth is that complex composite tasks such as musical writing and appreciation involve large areas in both cerebral hemispheres. 

 

     It’s a shame that such a large popular literature has evolved purporting to teach people how they need to develop their full potential and use both sides of the brain. in daily pursuits they absolutely are using both cerebral hemispheres. in any case, quite famous musicians have who had strokes and other lesions have been looked at [x] In some cases, classically trained literate musicians have been crippled by lesions to the left hemisphere.  They simply could not analyze, listen to or write music linguistically using their left hemisphere, and their lofty strata of musicianship surely involved intimately almost their whole brain as would be expected. Brain lesions that affect musical function produce defects affectionately called amusias which like speech deficits can be analyzed into types expressive (inability to produce) and receptive (inability to understand) amusia. Y Some musicians with limited lesions in one or the other hemisphere are able to carry out musical functions anyway.  Perhaps less demanding musical situations with simpler popular music or musical tasks might involve less of their brains and they would have been able to get away with functioning despite their cerebral lesions.

WRITING HISTORY:

     There are two distinct strategies in recording events.  One is record them literally with complete accuracy.  You can use writing instruments or machines, computers or calculators.  This is what, in popular parlance is done with the left hemisphere of the brain which is more analytical and closely tied to written and aural language, especially literacy,  what I would call a book-keeper’s or accountant’s reality.  The other strategy is to recollect the general impression or shape of reality, more of an artistic recollection perhaps incorporating emotion but this is a less faithful, more fanciful recollection as well, a far less exact rendition but closer to the way that most of us record reality, by inexact impressions and subject to mental editing.  Julian Jaynes makes the interesting point early on that bringing memories into consciousness and recording them, we are not reproducing actual experience.

 

“Or introspect on when you last went swimming: I suspect you have an image of a seashore, lake, or pool which is largely a retrospection, but when it comes to yourself swimming, lo! like Nijinski in his dance, you are seeing yourself swim, something that you have never observed at all!  There is precious little of the actual sensations of swimming, the particular waterline across your face, the feel of the water against your skin, or to what extent your eyes were underwater as you turned your head to breathe.  Similarly, if you think of the last time you slept out of doors, went skating, or -- if all else fails-- did something that you regretted in public,  you tend not to see, hear, or feel things as you actually experienced them, but rather to recreate them in objective terms, seeing yourself in a setting as if you were somebody else.  Looking back into memory, then, is a great deal invention, seeing yourself as others see you.  Memory is the medium of the must-have been.  though I have no doubt that in any of these instances you could by inference invent a subjective view of the experience, even with the conviction that it was the actual memory.”[xi]

 

     Reminiscence is editing altering and fitting in to one’s rubric.  We don’t actually record the whole of actual literal experience on a blank film the way a camera does.  We extract certain details and give them back subjectively. Literal photographic renditions are a novelty in art and literature.  But you always have to ask how much should art mirror reality.

 

 

 

                          Figure 5: We normally don't expect the literal in art[xii].

Realism, Distortion and Creativity:

 

     From the illustration above which is a literalist painting made to simulate a photograph you may surmise that mimicking reality with precision utilizing a brush is no trivial matter but every bit as hard as creating an impressionistic work.  Take a look at the sheen and specific patterns of light and dark that have to be achieved for the glass sugar dispenser alone.  From the purely evolutionary standpoint one can see the advantage of being able to memorize then perhaps reproduce a carbon copy of the real world in order to be able to respond to it.  Planning a motor response or strategy of response is best done when we have an exact idea of what is there.  But as we have already seen, neither perception nor memories are that accurate. Perceptions are not exact reproductions and memories are subject to editing.

 

     Two further processes, distortion of reality and creativity are even harder to understand from the point of evolution and adaptation.  If an animal or person distorts or changes reality, it makes it that much harder to plan and manipulate in an adaptive way. How do we know there is distortion in perception?  For one thing there are so many different strategies for seeing.  The spider with eight eyes has a much different strategy for recording visual events than man.  Undoubtedly he’s designed to make primitive responses to simple elements in his visual world with more or less hard-wired direct connections from his eyes to muscles that can make a change whereas we humans are more attuned to take in the big picture rather than to respond to small elements of a scene.  Even among people though, when a lot of people witness the same event the accounts disagree.  They can’t all be right of course and this non-reproducibility of perception is a sign that there is distortion. (Figure 6)

 

Figure 6: The predatory spider has eight simple eyes of various sizes that respond to key aspects of the visual field. Tactile sensations derived from the web are more important to spiders than vision is.[xiii]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[xiv]

 

 

 

	Figure 7: Fundamentally different ways of seeing things depend on design of eye and nervous system. Piecemeal or particulate percept is closer to a spider eye view of the world, whereas whole structured view is closest to our own.

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

CREATIVITY:

     What of creativity?  Few artists seek to make an exact copy of a real image though that is one approach to art, more akin to photography.  But a photograph would include none of the message of the artist, nothing of his inner self.   Granted, the photographer selects his images, seeking to photograph something worthwhile and thinks nothing of altering his photographic subject or waiting for just the right moment to take a photograph.  The painter, on the other hand, does not need to manipulate reality except in his mind’s eye and is free to distort images at will. Distortion may just be a matter of style as it was at the time of El Greco’s Saint Jerome.   El Greco had no particular perceptual deficit.  He was merely painting his subjects as was the custom of his time,   as an elongated figure.  Still this distortion as maladaptive as it is makes a work of art.  It is a change that biology and evolution just cannot explain. 

 

     The origins of abstract art are not to be found in biology that can barely explain what we do see and how our vision adapts us to the practical world. A record of reality, no doubt, serves a useful purpose, such as an exact internal map of territory and internal picture of prey and other animals in one’s own species.  It is easy to understand how an internal mental map might help an animal. Predator and prey would both have a distinct advantage knowing the lay of the land and obstacles to be encountered in a chase.  The usefulness of pure imagination is more difficult to defend.  The biggest problem is that imagined distorted pictures of reality are inaccurate and may actually be maladaptive. Much better to have an accurate picture of reality than an inaccurate one, all else being equal. This is at first glance.  

Go to Part V

 

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