Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Sport 39: 2011

The Mind’s Eye

page 273

The Mind’s Eye

I place my chin on the rectangle of paper on the rest, press my forehead against plastic and look through the viewer. This is how I have always imagined it would be. I am looking down a road, with fields on either side, and in the distance is a house with a red roof. The colours are over-saturated, the grass too green, the sky too blue, the road too yellow. It is as if I have materialised in this place with no past and nothing before me except what I can see. And yet it is familiar, as if I have been here before—have done this test before—which as a matter of fact I have, in another optometrist’s windowless room, in another country, five or ten or twenty years ago, but it might be yesterday: same house, same fields, same yellow road. The image shudders, blurs; there is a soft whirring sound, and it clicks back into focus.

The relationship of sight to thought has long perplexed me. I am intrigued by and slightly suspicious of people who claim to think in pictures, who close their eyes and say, ‘I can still see his face.’ If I stood as a child in a small, bright room while my grandfather tied with emerald thread a lock of my hair to a tiny hook, I might remember myself watching, might in some sense summon the scene, might describe it in words; but see it in my mind’s eye? I don’t know.

Part of my not knowing is not being sure how literally to take this term, ‘the mind’s eye’. Is it a figure of speech, by which, perhaps, we have allowed ourselves to become overly enchanted? Or are there, really, two ways of seeing: one that involves the eye, and one that does not?

There is a cartoonish account of mental representation which, were I to draw it, would look something like this. A man is looking at an apple: shiny, red, shaded to give it more of a 3D effect than the man himself, who is sketched in black and white. In the next picture the apple has gone, and the man is talking to a woman. The man has apage 274 think balloon coming out of his head. In the think balloon is a picture of the apple: shiny, red, etc. The word ‘apple’ is in a speech balloon coming out of his mouth. In the next frame the woman has a think balloon coming from her head, containing the—identical!—picture of the apple. Perhaps it is surrounded by a starburst of lines, to show how it has popped into existence, like a bubble bursting but in reverse. Memory is about calling an image to mind; communication is about getting the image from your head into someone else’s.

Our descriptions of thought are shot through with visual meaning, to the extent that it can be quite difficult to describe conscious processes without implying they are fundamentally visual (is it possible to disentangle imagination from image?). Yet the mind is a strange and murky soup containing all manner of ingredients which occasionally bubble to the surface and then sink again. Consciousness seems to me to encompass not only those fleeting moments in which these elements make themselves fully known to us, but also a more nebulous sense of what is sunk just below the surface. Thought abseils from point to point; it involves a blurring, a restlessness, a velocity. It is amorphous, elliptical, it resists being pinned down. It is not very much like a balloon containing a picture of an apple.

Or perhaps this is just me. It’s difficult enough to understand the nature of one’s own consciousness, let alone that of others—to compare and say yes, we are the same in this respect, or no, I set myself apart from you. My mother told me years ago, expecting me I think to share her incredulity, that my father had claimed not to think in pictures at all. She says her own mental images are clear and lucid. When I ask her if ‘the mind’s eye’ is a metaphor, she tells me it is not; so I ask her again, and then again, reframing the question, trying to find the fault lines in her certainty. I want to see it in her, the doubt I feel myself, marooned between my father’s blank denial and her confident assent.

I have always enjoyed eye examinations: the padded leather seat, the archaic round frames into which the optometrist slots the lenses before asking you to read the third line from the bottom of the chart. This one is polite, meticulous. He is wearing a blue shirt with an embroidered pattern across the back and over one sleeve. His degreepage 275 certificate is hanging on the wall next to his chair. I bask in his interest in how things look to me (‘Which one is better? One? Or two? One? Or two?’). I mention that the process has become more involved over the years. He tells me this is because we now know more about the eye, and can detect problems earlier. He asks me to look at his left ear and shines a rectangle of light into my right pupil; its after-image gleams when I blink. He repeats the test on the other side, then tells me he would like to take photographs of my retinas. This will cost an extra twenty-five dollars. I am secretly pleased: I haven’t had photographs before. Twenty-five dollars is nothing. Afterwards he shows me the prints, which are grotesquely enlarged, the blood vessels thick like vines. I feel myself recoil slightly. ‘This is the macula,’ he says, gesturing at the darkest area. ‘And this—’ a bright disk, where the blood vessels converge ‘—is the optic nerve.’

It seems implausible that these alien structures are even remotely involved with the experience of sight. Yet somehow or other, it all starts here. I study the image of the eye with which I am studying the image, while the optometrist waits patiently, like a curator who has escorted me to a private exhibit. Then I nod, he slides the prints into a white envelope, folds down the flap, and puts them aside.

For the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, the mind was a blank sheet—a tabula rasa—on which experience imprints itself.1 Following Locke, David Hume accounted for ideas as faint copies of their source sensations: to think about the colour red is to ‘see’ it, but less vividly than if there were something red before you.2 I find myself wanting to ask foolish questions of this account. Mr Hume, I want to say, do you mean that ideas literally fade—as the framed print of Monet’s Poppies near Argenteuil on my mother’s living-room wall has done over the decades, the red poppies dulling to brick, the white clouds yellowing? If this were so, wouldn’t it be difficult to distinguish my memory of the picture when it was new and bright from my visual impression of it now it is aged? Hume would smile benignly (he has a powdered wig, a puffy face). You’re being obtuse, he would say. It is true: on this subject I am and have been obtuse. When I ask my mother if she does not find herself confused between her mental images and real ones, she becomes a little impatient. ‘Maybe you are expecting apage 276 mental image to be something it is not,’ she says. ‘Maybe,’ I say.

And so: when I think of the print on my mother’s wall there is a something-or-other that comes to mind, not an image of it exactly but a sense of its specificity, such that if I were presented with it—if I were to google ‘Monet poppies’ and scan the results—I would be able to say, ‘Yes: that is the one’; in much the same way that, when you have a particular word on the tip of your tongue, you might pick it out from a list of synonyms. I know for example that there are two pairs of people walking in a field, each pair comprising a woman and a child, one pair in the foreground and one further back to the left; I know their faces are indistinct; I know at least one of the women is holding a parasol. Is this ‘the mind’s eye’? I wonder why I’m so reluctant to use the term. Perhaps it is because my mental image, if that is what it is, is somehow blank, inchoate and not-coloured-in. I cannot inspect it to remind myself what the picture looks like. So too, if I draw my daughter’s face, it is not (as far as I can tell) by copying an image of her which I hold in my mind; indeed, I am always a little surprised at the miracle of resemblance as my pencil passes knowingly across the page.,lb/>

In the nineteenth century, the psychologist Francis Galton investigated differences in people’s ability to form mental images. He sent questionnaires to the corners of the ‘civilised’ world, which subjects duly returned, rating their mental images according to a set of criteria. ‘Think,’ he instructed them, ‘of some definite object—suppose it is your breakfast-table as you sat down to it this morning—and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind’s eye.’ He asked if the image was dim, or brightly illuminated; if it was well defined; if the colours of the ‘china, toast, bread crust, mustard, meat and parsley’ were distinct and natural; and if the images appeared to be situated ‘within the head, within the eye-ball, just in front of the eyes, or at a distance corresponding to reality’.3

Galton concluded there was a vast natural range in human ability to form mental images. At the bottom of this range were ‘men of science’, most of whom, he observed, have ‘a mental deficiency of which they [are] unaware’.4 It is a deficiency, however, of which he was forgiving, hypothesising that ‘an over-ready perception of sharppage 277 mental pictures is antagonistic to acquirement of habits of highly generalised and abstract thought … The highest minds,’ he added, perhaps with someone in mind, ‘are probably those in which [the ability to form mental images] is not lost, but subordinated …’5

Of course, the limitation of Galton’s research is that it relied on people’s reports of essentially private experiences. There is no doubt we differ in how we describe our visual imaginations; but do the experiences themselves differ, and is it even meaningful to ask the question? Philosophers debate the existence of qualia, a term used to describe the subjective quality of experience—not the behaviour of answering correctly when the optometrist asks you to read numbers from his book of coloured dots, but the what-it-is-like-to-see-it of colour. If I look at the apple and say ‘red’, and you look at the apple and say ‘red’, is it the same for both of us? Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that this is the point at which language falters.6

Psychologists in the first part of the twentieth century, impatient with a concept of the mind which seemed to elude them, turned their attention outwards, towards behaviours which could be observed and measured. But developments in neuroscience in the latter part of the century provided a new angle from which to come at the mind. For if we follow our question, as we must, up the length of the optic nerve and into the brain, it turns out the visual cortex is involved in the formation of mental images, as it is in the case of sight itself.7 I mention this to my mother. ‘You see,’ she says. ‘Not just a metaphor then.’

Not for her, perhaps. Because Galton was right in this: we differ in our ability to perform this feat, to see without the eye. During MRI scans, the visual networks glow most brilliantly in those who lay claim to a vivid inner moviescape.8 And for the first time I understand that there is something I lack: it is not that I was more precise, more circumspect in my descriptions, but that a dimension of thought— bright, prismatic, kaleidoscopic—is out of reach to me.

The optometrist wants me to do one more test. I follow him into another room, which is bare except for a machine and two chairs. He gives me a patch to cover one eye, wipes the chin rest with alcohol and tells me to wait a minute for it to dry before I put my head inpage 278 place. I have to focus on a pinpoint of light. Other lights flash in my peripheral vision, some distinct, some faint. I have a device with a button which I click with my thumb to indicate when I think I see a light. Not when I see one, when I think I see one. The distinction seems significant: I click more often than I otherwise might. The optometrist gives constant feedback—‘You’re doing well, great, excellent, you’re a quarter of the way through.’ Even though I realise this is a practised technique, even though his words sound rote and he seems a little bored, I find myself irrationally pleased each time he praises me. When there are longish gaps between lights he is silent, and I fight the temptation to make spurious clicks. After a while the machine beeps. I put the patch over the other eye, and we repeat the process. Every so often a brighter light fills me with the relief of certainty; the duller ones leave me doubtful and a little depressed. So this is all then: not Dorothy opening a door to find the yellow brick road unfolding in Technicolor at her feet; just a series of dim, half-present flickerings. I click my button, and accept the praise that comes.

After I leave the optometrist’s I walk around the waterfront. It is bitterly cold. In front of me, a man guides a tricycle by a pole while a small blond child pedals furiously into the southerly. The sun, having failed all day to break through the clouds, has now unexpectedly succeeded, and the harbour has a silver sheen. Some way out a small island rises unremarkably, petticoated by whitecaps. Its outline is asymmetrical, sloping more sharply to the left than the right. I try to memorise its crenulations, the jagged tops of what could be trees or jutting rocks. When I close my eyes it disappears.

To what extent can the mind’s eye see? It seems the answer is: more than I thought. I wonder whether my imagination must, without this power, be weakened and generic. It’s a thought that stops me in my tracks. Writers, so often counselled to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, are wise to the power of observational detail, to the difference between the abstract idea of suicide, and the humid afternoon you stood on a platform at a suburban station in Sydney, and a dark-haired woman handed you her purse—it was the kind embroidered with tiny beads, pink and yellow and white, but threadbare in places—and did not jump but merely stepped in front of the oncoming train.

page 279

I cannot see it. And yet … However it does so, the world must have ways of leaving its mark other than by stamping us with its literal resemblance. Its splinters embed themselves like asbestos under the skin: purse, beads, train. Perhaps there is a brighter, more vivid way to remember, but I do not know it. And in the end, we make do with what we have.

Some years after my grandfather died my mother told me she found she could no longer call his face to mind. It had seemed to me she was describing the absence of something which could never have existed. (I wonder if it was from my father that I inherited too this tendency to disbelieve what I cannot myself see.) But now perhaps I understand. The mental image is both the same and not the same— enough to convince and yet not really. And it is into this gap that longing creeps: the near and yet so far of it, the here and now it’s gone of it. On a Christmas morning my mother opened a present from my uncle, a photograph of their father, one she had not seen before. He had not liked to have his picture taken—this was one her brother had had enlarged, the face taken from a group shot. Consequently, it was a little blurry. But it was him: the uneven redness of his skin, the jug ears, the unkempt eyebrows. Her eyes filled with tears. Dad, she said.

1 Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p54.

2 Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Digireads.com, 2010, p11.

3 Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. BiblioBazaar, 2008, pp304–5.

4 Galton, p86.

5 Galton, p88. Galton’s interest in the ranking of mental abilities is no fleeting concern; he coined the term ‘eugenics’ and advocated financial incentives for early marriage between families deemed to have superior hereditary characteristics.

6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Macmillan, 1968.

7 Xu Cui, Cameron B. Jeter, Dongni Yang, P. Read Montague, David M. Eagleman. ‘Vividness of mental imagery: Individual variability can be measured objectively.’ Vision Research 47 (2007).

8 Xu Cui, Cameron B. Jeter, Dongni Yang, P. Read Montague, David M. Eagleman.