“Every act of perception, even something as simple as viewing a drawing of a cube, involves an act of judgment of the brain.” – Ramchandran M.D., PH.D.
In this unit about perception, I learned the most interesting things in a long time spent in school. The brain and the perception we have of our environment are so much more complex and fascinating than we think they are. While probably most of the people on earth take their vision for granted, it baffles me how ignorant everyone is. The fact that there are thirty different parts in the brain for vision only, is immense when you consider that each little section has a different function of vision, such as movement and color. Not all of the thirty section’s functions are known. It demands a person that suffered damage in the specific area of the brain in order to determine the function of that section. Neurology and science in general tells us so much about our perception. We believe in what we see, hear or touch, but when we get a better understanding of our own brain, we start to consider that there are so much more ways than one to look at perception, and we begin to understand the reason why we trust our senses so much. The chapter ‘Phantoms in the brain’ by Ramchandran reveals some insights into the complicated world of neuroscience. He writes that the brain has its own way of judging the outside world. A cube can be seen in more than one perspective even though physically, it doesn’t change. Some blind people that have been injured, are able to detect movement although traditionally they are completely blind. This could be compared to a lizard. In fact, several animals have no or almost no vision at all. They rely on other senses like their auditory sense or their smell. A shark for example can smell a drop of blood in water from a distance of 400 meters. Their nostrils are dedicated only to their smell, they can’t breathe through them like we do. It is amazing how incredibly different our senses are from other living beings on this planet, and how each species has adapted to their environment. An earth worm, for example, is completely blind because he doesn’t need eyes under the soil.
The German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz, called perception an unconscious interference. Unconsciously, we decide whether the dots on a leopard are all separate, or if they belong to one and the same being. This sounds so overwhelming and hard to understand, but in the chapter of Ramachandran’s book, it makes a little more sense. In the video we saw in class, a man was completely blind on his left eye, but still he was able to detect movement, unconsciously. He couldn’t see anything, no color, no shape, nothing. But when a lightening ball was moving up and down, he could tell whether it was up or down. The same happened with a woman mentioned in the chapter ‘Phantoms in the brain’. There is so much more ‘seeing’ going on than what we actually see with our eyes. If you think about it, we have so much in our own bodies that we don’t know about, that we don’t understand. Our brains, the nervous tissue in our bodies that receives all nervous information and transmits the information to the parts of the bodies that need to follow a command, are so complex that we don’t even fully understand what it means to see. When you know this, all that you know goes into a larger perspective. Who are we to believe that the sky is blue if we don’t even know what happens within our brain when we think about the fact that it is?
