The Astonishing Hypothesis is a fascinating and sophisticated read; writtten by Nobel Winner Francis Crick. In TAH Crick demonstrates some startling and obvious scientific evidence for the visual brain and concomitantly, the visual mind. Many of us think visually, some have an audio-spatial aspect. Human beings, it turns out, are Visual Creatures. Hardly surprising when one notices our fascination with computers, gaming, movies, tv, magazines, fashion, pornography and other visual stimulators.
It is fascinating then the metaphors that come into play. If our intelligence is predicated on visual realities, if we think in pictures, then we're able to dream and delude ourselves in pictures/error memories/false impressions etc. as well.
When this mind-wiring goes wrong we encounter people who might be glancing at light coming through a fence suffering epilepsy (the brain being tricked into reacting to staggered patterns of light), others my have defective mind wiring at birth preventing them from being able to walk from one side of a room to the next. The point is, how we see the world is of fundamental importance. I have often queried whether we see the Now, and also, do we see where we are, ourselves, in the world, rather than just seeing the world from our various points of view.
Context and perspective provide valuable insights...
What I remember from the book that perhaps made the greatest impression was that the mind is essentially an incredibly cosmos of electricity. The human mind seems to me to be an evolved apparatus seeming to recreate/redesign the outer universe it seeks to understand through the inner engineering of equally sophisitcated parallel spherical networks/circuits/orbits, able to run in parallel or chronological patterns, single-handling or multitasking or both. Hence short term and longer term memory.
To paint a picture; the circuitry of the brain appears to have attempted to wire itself in imitation of the universe's star systems. The Milky Way and it's subsystems seems to me to have been rendered in similar electrical circuits (points of light and energy). In the same way, our bodies are composed of 70% water, just as the body of the planet that gave us life is composed of similar proportions of water and salt and everything else.
The mind essentially spends a lot of its primary processing power filling in the gaps. Believe it or not, there is a lot our brains see that does not make sense. Our brains constantly fill in these 'holes'. It is exceedingly good at these guesses, and is often correct. However, it (we) can make mistakes. In Gladwell's book 'Blink' an illustration is made on how INTENSELY powerful thin-slicing (based largely on visual cues and clues) is, but also how easily it can go wrong. Using thin-slicing we're able to make very accurate predictions on very very sophsiticated issues, such as: will a couple that get married, ultimately divorce?
Order: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
The mistake Gladwell illustrated was of a policeman who mistook a wallet for a pistol butt and shot and killed a man by mistake. The brain fills in information, and can be inclined to fill in what we WANT to see, or what we EXPECT to see, bringing about a self-fulfilling scenario that may be distinct from reality.
It may be surprising for some to realise that when we see, only a small proportion is sharply in focus. In fact, the area that our vision is directly to is sharply in focus, and as soon as we move our gaze around this point, the illusion is created that everything is in focus. Our mind's fill in for us the illusion that everything we see, everything around us is in focus, when in fact, very little is. This is a startling revelation, because it places us precisely where we are. We begin to realise that for all the pinpricks of reality that we see and verify, there are entire surfaces and peripheries that remain hidden from us.
If we can accept (and acknowledge) the limits to our perceptions, we can begin to humbly develop these into even greater processing power. But right now, I believe a vital need is that we realise there are some fundamental limits to what we believe we are seeing. Our ignorance of what is happening beyond our perception becomes increasingly dangerous. And with the tremendous amount of data flowing in the world, we still focus on that which we choose to focus, reinforcing this cycle of selective reality.
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