by Bruce Han­ify

Have you ever con­sid­ered that the brain must learn how to see?  Vision is not auto­matic. Even if we couldn’t test infants, we know from dra­matic blind-to-sight sto­ries that the brain must learn how to process visual data. Appar­ently it does this by pro­cess­ing mov­ing images. (Read about MIT’s neuro-scientific exper­i­ments on the fac­ulty of vision in Out of Dark­ness, Sight: How the Brain Learns to See.) Does that mean that at one time in evo­lu­tion we couldn’t see light? Like, maybe we were pod peo­ple? Aliens implanted our eyes? I leave those tit­il­lat­ing ques­tions to greater minds than my own. (A friend of mine used to pon­der why we had to have eyebrows. I quickly answered that many folks don’t. That seemed hugely funny at the time.)

In his book, Cos­mic Con­scious­ness, Cana­dian physi­cian Dr. Richard Mau­rice Bucke observed how the human fam­ily appar­ently could not see BLUE until very recently in our his­tory. He pro­vides fur­ther exam­ples of how our senses evolved new detec­tions of fra­grances, and so on. What seems sim­ple to us was pre­ceded by incred­i­bly long, com­plex bio­log­i­cal changes. Bucke also pre­dicted some­thing I believe: human beings are now poised to enter a higher state of con­scious­ness he called cos­mic con­scious­ness. Much of the dis­ar­ray we’re expe­ri­enc­ing at the moment is appar­ently part of this process.

Read­ers who are inter­ested in some of the mar­velous struc­tural changes in our brains, and how that has affected self con­scious­ness, should make the time to read Julian Jaynes’ The Ori­gins of Con­scious­ness in the Break­down of the Bicam­eral Brain and Erich Neumann’s Ori­gins and His­tory of Con­scious­ness. What you and I refer to as “right” and “left” brain is a fairly recent devel­op­ment in the long evo­lu­tion of the homo sapi­ens. For many mil­len­nia, we humans lived inside a brain where there was no such dis­tinc­tion. It is use­ful to learn how these things work because many politi­cized terms are actu­ally func­tions of changes in brain struc­ture and chem­istry, as opposed to objec­tive truths. If peo­ple took more time to study these things, instead of start­ing fights at hol­i­days, we’d all be bet­ter off. Of course, Tony Buzan’s books are invalu­able tools as well.

Years of life expe­ri­ence and some­where over 200 jury tri­als have taught me that human beings don’t “see” nearly so well as they think. Have you ever watched the Selec­tive Atten­tion Test, from Daniel Simons and Christo­pher Chabris?

HOW MANY TIMES DOES THE TEAM IN WHITE PASS THE BALL?

In my expe­ri­ence it is the rare juror who under­stands that our brains don’t work very well, if by “well” you mean ‘I am cer­tain.’ Have you ever dri­ven into traf­fic only to dis­cover — per­haps at great cost — that you had a “blind spot”? Well, the intel­lect is pock­marked with blind spots. If you don’t believe me, sign up for a logic or math class at your local col­lege; and if you’re “left-brained”, take a course on lit­er­a­ture or women’s stud­ies. You’ll find out in short order that your brain is order­ing what it sees. It does not see nearly so well as you may believe. Alas, sight is very much a func­tion of belief. Hard to accept, isn’t it? Yet it is true, and that fact has a direct bear­ing on what we can expect in the wake of this change in Ages. Those of us who are alive at this time are like the blind folks in Plato’s Alle­gory of the Cave. We think we see, but we never ask:

‘What do we think we’re seeing?’

Once you ask that ques­tion, life gets very inter­est­ing indeed. It is, in fact, the only hon­est ques­tion that can ever be asked, because once we ask it, we have to take respon­si­bil­ity for what we see.

The early Chris­t­ian Bishop, Syne­sius of Cyrene (370–413), made a num­ber of remark­able state­ments about our imag­i­na­tion, or our soul, that have a bear­ing on this dis­cus­sion. I want to share two with you. They are some­what dif­fi­cult to grasp, but they will repay atten­tive reading:

Imag­i­na­tion is the sense of the senses (the first body of the soul), nec­es­sary to all oth­ers: it inheres at the same time in both the soul and the body, It dwells within us: estab­lished in the head, as in a citadel which nature has built for us, and it gov­erns the ani­mal life. The hear­ing and the sight are not true senses, but rather instru­ments of sense, which put the ani­mal in rela­tion with the exte­rior world; in the ser­vice of imag­i­na­tion they trans­mit to their mis­tress impres­sions received by them from with­out, sen­sa­tions which are trans­mit­ted to us from the objects by which we are sur­rounded. Imag­i­na­tion is the col­lec­tive sense in which are united our var­i­ous senses: in real­ity it is that which hears and which sees; it is through it that all the per­cep­tions occur; and it assigns to each organ its par­tic­u­lar func­tion. From it all the fac­ul­ties pro­ceed: they are like the rays which go out of the cen­tre and meet wholly in the cen­tre: many in pro­gres­sion, and one and the same in ori­gin. The sense to which the organs are indis­pens­able is a purely mate­r­ial sense; or, to speak more cor­rectly, it is only a sense when it enters into the ser­vice of the imag­i­na­tion: imag­i­na­tion is the sense which has power of act­ing instan­ta­neously with­out inter­me­di­aries. It has a divine char­ac­ter through which it approaches intu­itive Intellect.

It will thus be estab­lished that the soul, as we have advanced, con­tains in itself the images of the things which become. It encloses them wholly, but it pro­duces them out­wardly only at a con­ve­nient time; imag­i­na­tion is sim­i­lar to a mir­ror in which it reflects itself, so that the ani­mal per­ceives the images which have their seats in the soul.

Syne­sius seems to be say­ing two things: first, that the ani­mal world, of which we are a part, is very lim­ited in what it can see, as indi­cated by the MIT study; and, sec­ond, that we we call “truth” is, accord­ing to Syne­sius, a func­tion of how are soul presents the world to us. Lest you think that closes the dis­cus­sion, Syne­sius writes at length about how to restore the imag­i­na­tion to its proper abode, the soul. He seemed to think that we cor­rupted the process of sight by reject­ing those things which the soul knows. In other words, part of the soul’s bondage is to find itself ensnared in inter­pre­ta­tions which are closer to the ani­mal king­dom. If imag­i­na­tion is restored to its proper place, we could con­sis­tently pro­duce har­mo­nious and pros­per­ous con­di­tions on earth.

One way of under­stand­ing this is to look at what hap­pens when peo­ple project evil onto a politi­cized label (pick your label). What they’ve done at that point is to ensure an out­come con­sis­tent with their expectation.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BRUCE HANIFY 2012