VISUAL CONNOTATIONS: I – Of Illusions in the Mind’s ‘Eye’

 

Ever since early childhood, I have watched clouds. As a photographer, I have added to this predilection the watching of waves, flowing water, patterns in sand, and more. As photographers, we are all essentially searchers for patterns of light.

 

All we see is light and nothing but light. Our visual experiences are based entirely on the reception of reflected, refracted, dispersed, diffracted light. The only addition to the sensation of vision is twofold. Firstly, analysis and interpretation by our visual cortex in the brain takes place of the impulses delivered from our retinal cells in the eyes by nerves. Then, possible ‘editing’ by our imagination follows this. We do not see a tree in front of us; we simply perceive light that has bounced off an object that absorbs some wavelengths of sunlight and not others, scatters some wavelengths but not all. Our mind, however, pretends that the object is actually there, that it is in reality what it seems to us – that is, a real, genuine tree and not a meaningless simulacrum or a figment of our imagination.

 

Our mind can do nothing else; for without this interpretation by our visual system that some of the patterns of light that we perceive indicate the presence of real objects (important as food, predators, shelter, for example), sight as an adapted sense could not have evolved. However, should we ever be able to interrogate a different species about what it sees, the answer we receive would astound us.

 

And so, from the very beginning, all sensations, not only sight, were limited to the perception of the stimuli provided by the patterns of the world and not the processes, the emergent patterns only resulting from underlying formative processes that are hinted at but that remain elusive. We humans are obsessed with pattern, in particular the diversity of patterns. For us, a miniscule difference between two otherwise matching patterns is imbued inevitably with interest, with importance; distinctions always indicate a significance for which we want to ‘know’ the reason. Identical patters too are significant because they represent another food item, another predator or another mate, for example. Our minds focus on difference and similarity.

 

Our attempts to set boundaries and to classify our experiences of the world around us probably are as ancient as the advent of our nervous systems, certainly as old as the advent of language. Just as ancient as language as well are our problems with our classification systems – if something fits here, it necessarily does not belong there – and thus the struggle begins to shoehorn objects, concepts and experiences into rigid frameworks of classification, usually arranged hierarchically to reflect some more of our mind’s biases. Alternatively, we hack liberally at existing categories, cleaving away ever-smaller pockets to house our favoured items, and so populating our classifications with sub-, meta- and hyper-taxa. Consequently, our perception of the world has become categorised into discrete entities, and we have lost the ability to perceive the fundamental unity of process that has shaped every pattern that we can sense in our surrounding.

 

Of course, this endeavour of classification does not end with the inanimate and animate world, but extends, by use and habit, into our own human existence and into our relationships with other humans. Since we focus intensely on the distinctions between patterns, we are often convinced that the boundaries we imagine and construct in our minds and knowledge are real; they are a true representation of hiatuses in reality, even in otherwise continuous patterns and processes. From there, it becomes almost inevitable that we should set and reinforce with significance the boundaries that we believe will be of help to us while we attempt to keep our own group safe and separate from the barbarians at the gate.

 

So, two quirks of our mind and our experiences, the hiatus between reality and our sensory experience of it and our mind’s obsession with pattern and boundaries, amalgamate with devastating outcome to limit our knowledge and imagination. It is the confusion and conflation of process and pattern that can and does befuddle our minds. Simple and well-known illustrations of our minds’ predispositions are optical illusions of various kinds.

 

Illusions, in general, are defined as instances of the perception and interpretation of sensory experiences that give rise to misrepresentations of reality – instances during which the experience differs from actuality. Illusions are not faults of our sensory systems; they indicate the physical and biological restraints of our systems and of our cognitive interpretation of the sensory stimulation received.

 

Optical illusions are a subset of sensory illusions; they are illusions arising from the workings of our visual system. Some so-called optical illusions are not really illusions as defined since they do not lead to misrepresentations of reality. Examples include the ‘bending’ of the straw as you immerse it in a glass of water, and the fact that ‘in reality’ the sun is already located beneath the horizon while you can still see it above the horizon at sunset.

 

These physical optical ‘illusions’ are really optical phenomena that arise when light is refracted as it travels across the boundary between media of differing optical densities. These are ‘strange’ realities and not faults of the visual system or a result of misinterpretation by our minds. The less strange optical phenomena like the dispersion of light in rainbows or halos do not qualify as optical illusions at all; yet in the process of the interaction of light with matter there is no significant difference between these less peculiar observations and instances of the ‘illusions’ of the refraction of light.

 

The fascinating, often mesmerising, misrepresentations of reality, the truly illusory visual experiences, are the result of ambiguities that arise in the processing and interpretation of the visual information received by the brain. These ambiguities are often triggered by unconscious assumptions and inferences of what the information ‘pictures’.

 

In the second instalment, I will explore further the illusions our minds experience or conjure up, and the implications that the human mind’s phenomenal ability at pattern recognition (and misrecognition) hold for the visual arts, including the craft of photography.