Question

Art Connects

When I first began studying perception forty years ago, it was primarily with the purpose of seeing what useful information the science of perception had to offer a visual artist. The gestalt psychologists of the mid-twentieth century had developed a body of research that showed how visual elements were sorted and assembled and how the underlying assumption of gravity affected our sense of what we were seeing. Since art is processed by the same circuits and priorities as the real world, everything I read was relevant and the research was growing fast. I was hooked. The specifics of the eye/brain pathways were fascinating and complex and led to a better sense of how the stimulus that hit the retina became what we saw. When I understood how certain changes were processed unconsciously I could create stronger illusions of space and volume. Drawing convincing spatial effects and then contradicting them with equally convincing spatial effects enabled me to stir some doubts about the limits of our theories about reality.

The structure of our lived experience becomes the armature for future knowledge. This gives a deep spatial component to how our knowledge is organized in our mind/brain. We learn by forming new circuits and solidifying others while what we never return to gets pruned away. Re-imagining the new information in relation to other information creates multiple routes and better access to our accumulated experience. The correspondence of one pattern to another (isomorphism) in entirely different systems underlies our ability to understand new experience and is the basis for analogy and metaphor and our use of overt visual representations like maps and diagrams.

Art helps us become aware of how much we can see and learn from what’s different. The underlying structure is universal, built on human movement in the external world, balancing, climbing, avoiding, reaching, grasping, all physical actions used regularly as metaphors. Art shows the inner feeling so connects from within, so we see what’s different as a just another manifestation of something we understand. The universal patterns in the unfamiliar show how similar we are at deep levels as beings that move in space.

  

Whenever we talk about art, we experience resonance with deep patterns of being. The way that each individual experiences those patterns is stirred, and the dynamics within personal memories may be clarified by the image that provoked them. As a class discusses their work, I try to pull out the whole range of ideas the image suggests so we can better understand what’s implied by different visual relationships. A wide spectrum of associations demonstrates the variety of ways that the same patterns can be experienced. We can see how the range of views fits into a larger picture and be less likely to get caught in the confines of a right/wrong conversation. Looking and talking about art nourishes our understanding of wholes. It develops our sensitivity to significant pattern and our intuition about what matters. As a fringe benefit of training a new generation of illusionists I see the rich variety in individual worldviews that is often suppressed by the wind of prevailing theory, repeated endlessly. Having more wide-ranging images of deeper realities may set us free to think what we really think while feeling more connected at the core. It may be what we need to take an evolutionary step.