Real or Imagined?
Right now I have a time-lapse experiment in progress at home. An infant beginning to appreciate that a person disappearing behind the curtain is not gone, just hidden; now a toddler who enlists me in pretend-play. The neuronal circuits necessary for imagination are busy being built.
The history of western art charts an analogous course for human civilization. Early examples of art relied heavily on ‘true-to-type’ representation of reality. From ancient Greece to Rome to Renaissance, art was all about how well you could recreate in stone or canvas what you see, as you see it. Parisians graduated to Impressionism when one day in 1874, Claude Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (Impression, soleil levant) was unveiled. A few seemingly random strokes of paint on canvas, enough for us to visualize the luminescent descent of the sun into the sea, was equated to an unfinished wallpaper by the art connoisseurs of 19th century. How is it that a few daubs of paint can evoke a whole scene in our mind? How is it that a stray strain of music or a whiff of a smell can bring alive a long forgotten experience? These are complex problems of imagination that we are nowhere near answering. But starting from the most basic examples of imagination, we are getting closer to understanding what our brain is capable of.When I look at the park through the bars of my bedroom window, I don’t see ten different square-shaped pieces of the tree outside; I see a whole tree and the squirrel scurrying up to its hole in the trunk. As I stare at the computer screen through my thick-rimmed glasses, my brain fills in the letters that are hidden behind the frame. More extremely, as VS Ramachandran describes in Phantoms in the Brain, patients who have injured their visual cortex and develop what is known as a scotoma, a hole in their visual field, live on apparently quite normally, filling-in appropriate information into the missing regions of their visual field; as a patient describes it, just occasionally walking into the wrong toilet by mistake when his scotoma hides the WO in the ‘WOMEN’.
Our brain, or more specifically the left hemisphere, is a master at glossing over the anomalies in our otherwise mundane world. It learns at an early age, with perhaps some contribution from evolution, the lay of the land. Confronted with confusing and apparently counter-intuitive information it confabulates to reassure our ‘mind’ that all is well. The right hemisphere on the other hand, specializes in dealing with new information. Thus, patients with a damaged right hemisphere and consequent left-side paralysis often become anosognosic, unaware of their disability, even to the extent of claiming to hear their two hands clapping!Another version of anosognosia is described by Oliver Sacks in his ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’. The patient is an accomplished musician who is living an apparently normal life although he is progressively unable to recognize objects, faces, his wife (whom he mistakes for a hat!) and even his own foot. He describes a glove as “a continuous surface, infolded on itself. It appears to have five outpouchings ...”, but does not recognize it as a glove, until by trial and error he manages to put his hand into it. Sacks happens to see a series of paintings done by the patient in the years leading up to and during the progression of his disease. They begin as realistic scenes with an attention to detail and progressively move towards geometric representation, then to a complete abstract lines and splotches.
This brings me neatly back to art and its move towards increasingly abstract forms. Today, we flock to see the cubist representations of Picasso, the surrealism of Dali and the experimental installations of Olafur Eliasson. Each in its own way challenges our senses, questions our perceptions of the world around us and makes us rethink our experience of what we call reality. The modern forms of art speak differently to each one of us. Richard Dawkins in his book, Unweaving the Rainbow, describes how when we all stand together and admire the rainbow in the rain-washed sky, each of us is, in reality, appreciating a slightly different rainbow, reaching our eyes through a slightly different set of prisms blowing in the wind.Schizophrenia is defined as a mental disorder that makes it difficult for the patient to tell the difference between the real and unreal (according to Pubmed Health). The deeper we dig into the workings of this wondrous mass of lipids we call ‘brain’, reality, as we know it, becomes all the more unreal. Perhaps it is just a question of where we are when viewing the rainbow.
Sources:
The story of Art by EM Gombrich
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by VS Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
Pubmed Health
Lots and lots of Google!!
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