Seeing: From Atoms to Galaxies

On the physical level, how actually do you see? Until rather recently, it was presumed that light waves gathered information from objects, which then went rushing along the optic nerve into the brain. Not so: for not a speck of light reaches the brain via the retina. Rather, seeing is a complex interaction of retinal cells, cones and rods, ganglions, optic nerves, primary and higher visual cortical regions, and ions of visual data leaping chasms from synapse to synapse backed up by neurotransmitters. Brain mapping has shown us how dispersed the brain’s visual field is. One part of the brain recognizes faces, another the expression on the face, another connects names with faces, while still another relates the face to all other faces you have seen. All this information – 80 percent from many parts of the brain and only 20 percent directly from the eye – comes into headquarters, the lateral geniculate nucleus, where “seeing” occurs. The brain then feeds the information gathered back to the eye itself.

Since seeing happens more in the brain than in the eye, to understand it we have to journey inward to the image-making process itself. If you close your eyes and press gently on the eyeballs – what do you see? Perhaps you see bits of line, arcs and curves. Then as you watch, higher visual constructs often begin to form: snowflake, spider web, and honeycomb patterns; parallel lines overlaid in grid forms with small spheres moving along each line; radial fanlike lines; checkerboard shapes; dots of dark and shadow; swirls or geometric patterns; something that looks like a time exposure of stars moving at night. These are the ideoretinal patterns, the universal form constants of the brain. Out of them our higher cortical structures build the rich imagery of the inner world that we project into the patterns we see in the outer world, according to Jean Houston, author of, Jump Time: Shaping Your Future in a World of Radical Change.

What is important to remember is that these shapes are universal; every human being has them. They are the basis for the creation of all visual reality. From these form constants, eidetic images emerge – images held, in the mind’s eye. Inner images are often loaded with physical and psychological content, a pain in some part of the body, a wash of emotion or depression. Therapists work with their clients to change the nature of the eidetic imagery, move it about, and repattern its forms so that the toxic effect of the recurrent or stuck images can be released. Working with neurofeedback quickens the pace to state flexibility.

If you want to try this, image someone with whom you have had a difficult time. As you see that person in eidetic memory, chances are the image has negative content and an unpleasant feel. Now, place that person in another context altogether. See them making cigars in a banana republic; put the two of you together as clowns in the circus; or have a wild and woolly adventure together. Then return to your original image and see how the emotion surrounding it has changed. It is likely that when you next see this person with your physical eyes, your reconstituted imagery will sponsor a friendlier and more spontaneous relationship. When Hamlet said, “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” he was recalling the power of eidetic imagery to impact perception.

So seeing, on the physical level, is accessing a vast electro-chemical complex involving billions of cells and multiple brain activities out of which arise our fears and joys of those we meet and our marching orders for how to proceed in relation to them. Prejudice is the pathos of limited seeing, the damping-down of the brain’s potential, a one-track catastrophe that objectifies the other as it subjugates the self. When we allow our seeing to be cut off at the level of superficial differences – skin color, body size, age, style of dress, social class – we loose something of the mystery and magic of the other and the magic and mystery of ourselves. I am less, if I do not see you as more. Living is an experience of mutuality; to exist is to be connected. “From atoms to galaxies,” as Jean Houston says, “the universe is a continuum of communion.” For too long we have been trained for xenophobia, for seeing the other as alien. We would like to think that we have moved forward, that we have gone beyond such ancient prejudice. Even in America, the chasm between rich and poor, us and them, majority and minority still threatens to swallow us all and these attitudes limit our personal potential and threaten our collective existence.

How, then, can people cross the great divide of otherness, step out of stereotypes and into seeing and honoring each other deeply? Human connections are engendered in the motherland of shared story. Microcosm or macrocosm, the disease of projection complicates relationships between individuals and between national, religious, and ethnic groups. When strong emotion is at play, empathy disintegrates. The old survival brain throws up barricades and concocts tales to justify personal and collective anger or sorrow. We take our old stories and experiences and project them as expected outcomes, even though the situation in which we are now engaged may have a very different plot. In this way, we tragically assure that tomorrow will look exactly like yesterday. My therapeutic endeavor is to encourage people to tell their most significant and heartfelt stories to each other, to meet at the level of deep listening before they get down to business at hand. When lives are shared, everything else follows. As Rachel Naomi Remen reminds us in Kitchen Table Wisdom, when we see each other through the distorted lens of labels and stereotypes, “we are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself.”