Lesson 20 - Lies From Your Eyes

 Hey all.
So, last week I wrote my post from the seat of an airplane high over somewhere. As such, it was a bit more disjointed than usual. I felt the need to continue the topic. I may yet again in the future. However, as such, todays post is a bit shorter than usual. Just a heads up. That said, here you go.


 Do you know what I like about illusions?

Everything.

They are just fun.  And not just the slight of hand illusions.  I love the visual illusions.  The geometric shapes that do not follow standard progression logic.  The things that you stare at and they start to do funky things.

Like the one where you stare at the white page full of blue dots with the black dot in the middle.  As the rules dictate, you stare at the black dot for about 30-45 seconds.  As you do, suddenly, all the blue dots vanish.

Poof.  All gone.

Until you shift your gaze and suddenly they are all right back where they were.

The dots, of course, didn’t actually go anywhere.  Because of your focus (and perhaps the color of the dots), your brain made them not register anymore.

There is also the one where you stare at the black spiral on the white page.  If you stare right into the center, the spiral will appear to swirl.  It isn’t swirling, but your brain started telling you it was swirling.  As soon as you shift your gaze, everything goes back to normal.

Our eyes and brain can play all manner of tricks on us.  They can create a perspective that isn’t quite as accurate as we think it is.

Just ask anyone who is color blind.  They know this as well as anyone.  Is that a red sock?  A green sock?  A blue sock?  A brown sock?  Black maybe?  You and I take the simple ability of seeing colors, perhaps, a little for granted.  Imagine if suddenly you couldn’t see them correctly.

I know one guy who is completely color blind.  He only sees shades of grey.  No pinks, blues, yellows, greens, or orange.  Only grey.

Learning traffic lights was tricky.  Especially when they started turning them sideways and not telling him which way they tilted it.  

He has adapted remarkably well.  So well, in fact, that you would never know he was color blind.  He admits that every once in a while he picks out that shirt that isn’t the color he thought, or gets the socks swapped, but it’s rare.  But when you have NEVER seen a color other than grey, you learn to perceive the shades.  The subtleties of grey and black and the nuances of non-color.  He is so good at it, that whenever I try to stump him on a color, he almost always gets it correct.

One time I held up an object that had lavender in it.  He guessed correctly.  I was pretty impressed.  

Apparently there is more to sight than simply color.

But not everyone is that proficient at it.  A color blind person knows that things are not always what they appear to be.

As we talked about last time, we don’t always perceive things the way they truly are.  Often, our mind fills in the blanks.  It will add things and subtract things, but rarely ever keep the whole picture in tact.  Usually the additions and subtractions are dictated by what we want to see or not see.

Police officers know that if they interview people at a crash site, they will get many versions of the story.  Similar, but different.  Everyone seeing one event different from another who saw the exact same event.

We rarely see what we think we see.

We have a responsibility to ourselves to reevaluate our perceptions and perspectives.  Of ourselves and others.  Learn to see the shades.  Learn to shift our gaze.  Learn to not let ourselves become so focused on one thing that we cease to notice anything else.

        Learning to see is not always about sight.