Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all expect the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the limited data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

New Blog: Kirkwood Tales

I've created a new blog for my stories etc. It's called Kirkwood Tales  The Page Stories  and Other Fictions on this blog will be transferred to the new blog.

New Blog: Meditations

I've decided to move all my sermons to a new blog. Its name is Kirkwood-Meditations. I hope it will be helpful and interesting.

Four ordinary people: Quartet in Atumn (Barbara Pym)

Barbara Pym. Quartet in Autumn (1977) Pym seems to be a nice lady who tells stories of nice and not so nice people of little consequence. That niceness hides a sharp and ruthless intelligence that sees and understands how people fail to live as fully as they may wish. Here, three of four single people who work together realise they may have rather more consequential ties than they have believed. The catalyst for this insight is the death by self-starvation of Marcia, one of the two women who’ve retired. Letty’s the other one. Norman and Edwin remain behind and when they retire, their department will cease to exist.

     The tone is calm and low-key. The four people’s characters emerge slowly from the apparently unimportant details of their apparently unimportant lives. Their links to the larger world threaten to break, but remain because of events they don’t and couldn’t control.

     It’s Pym’s strength that she makes you wonder and eventually care for these people who’ve worked all their lives at tasks (never described) whose importance to the company has long since been forgotten. Pym’s calm and matter-of-fact tone disguises a sharp insight into the unintentional cruelties inflicted on harmless people both by their circumstances and by each other. These are people who’ve let life pass them by. In the end, they’ve endured. That may be as close to a victory as they are capable of achieving.

     The questions is, have we, the readers, any better claim to success in our lives? Pym manages to insinuate at least the nagging ghost of that unwelcome question. 

     Recommended. ***

I'm an old man now (A poem)

 A Poem

I’m an old man now.
The weight of my memories
bears down on my days.
The truck there carries freight,
I carry my thoughts.
They pool like a lake.
The wind fractures the past.

The news showed a broken building
sliding into the street like water.
Gravity pulls the water over the edge;
a missile nudged the wall into silence.

I don’t hear much these days, cunning devices
in my ears catch the sound as it passes,
add and subtract. The words gleam
like crystals. But it’s not the light
of insight that dazzles.
The years have carried me
past too much indifference.

I’m granted nonsense,
cool and joyful, foam on the lake,
nudged by the wind
towards the silent stony shore.

I hold the coffee cup
and gaze at the garden.
Daylilies gleam like words.
They will fade before nightfall.
They will not know the dark.

2023-06-23 & 08-04/2024-03-21

 © W. Kirchmeir

The Cure For All Diseases (Reginald Hill, 2008)

 Reginald Hill. The Cure For All Diseases. (2008) Dalziel is recuperating at Sandytown from a near-lethal injury. The local patroness of the healing arts has teamed up with the local promoter of holistic healing to create a health-spa that will rejuvenate the town’s economy and add a considerable chunk to the patroness’s not inconsiderable fortune. She’s had two husbands, and is working on acquiring a third. Unfortunately, she’s murdered and rather grotesquely encaged in a contraption designed to roast the pig that’s the center piece of a commemoration of her first husband’s source of wealth. That’s not the only grotesquerie, but you’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who dun what to whom and what for.
      Another nicely plotted, wonderfully convoluted and narrated police procedural. Hill has taken Austen as his inspiration this time, labelling the book’s sections as “volumes”, and basing the cast loosely on Austen’s Sanditon. Pascoe is in charge while his boss recuperates, Wield steadies his new boss as skilfully as he’s steadied Dalziel. An assortment of Yorkshire eccentrics (are there any other kind?) tangle and untangle their relationships and the skein of clues that eventually lead to a satisfying solution. Recommended. ****

There's No History Here (poem)

There’s No History Here
Above Kama Bay

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows
who believe they can rebuild the past.

Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
who ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that hold
the coverlet together.

These tales made up
of memories, misremembered
names and half-remembered facts –
they don’t make a history,
they say.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.

Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true,
as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back
is as far as memory
and memories of memories may reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote, muted
by the space enfolding it.

The ghosts of those who came before us
do not speak in the wind,
their language does not
echo in the water-filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck.
Something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

The heat feels loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

©WEK:2005-2020