to look, to see -- art’s impact

ref. ‘The Brain’, a current ket series, 10pm on wed

Something said here a while back has been technologically verified. It was a theory born of subtle observation, but now they can now show that we ‘see’ through a complicated process of cognition, and it’s a product of what’s out there, maybe only twenty percent, and the rest what’s inside already. They did it with MRI watching the information come in through the eyes, mix all around in back somewhere to produce the final version, what we see. Isn’t that interesting -- it explains a lot. 

The reason we’re all so different is because we live on slightly different planets based on our visual histories, and the amazonian forest dweller and the hipster from the city probably wouldn’t recognize anything through each other’s eyes, at least for while. Folklore has it the native people at Vera Cruz couldn’t see Cortez’s ships, so different from their prior experience, and so imagined he emerged from the sea, strange enough in himself, tall and white. “Lot’s of things are invisible, Joey -- but we don’t know it ‘cause we can’t see ‘em,” so said Dennis. 

Turns out what we see, what we’re capable of seeing, depends on those endless rows of file cabinets we maintain, somewhere in our skulls, of stuff we’ve seen before. Using technology scientists have observed it as it happens, more information flowing forward than comes in through the eyes. Seems it’s the filing system and not the apparatus that has the major influence on what we see, and cataract surgery just makes it clearer. If what we see is determined in large part by what we’ve seen before, just knowing that grants an edge, an advantage, a productive insight to the thoughtful organism. 

Of course we can’t change the world, but we do have discretion when it comes to what we look at, pay attention to, even think about. Implications abound, but the influence of significant art should be clear. Mostly mysterious to be sure, but seriously considering art, owning and living with art, is probably going to have an influence on everything else, everything seen at least. Someone could claim that’s art’s purpose and function, here in the early twenty first, and right or wrong, they’d at least be scientific.