mills

“Phosphenes,” from Andrew Coulter Enright.

The inimitable S. Stratodrive informed me that the phenomenon in which one one sees spiralling, luminescing mosaics and masses of ghostly color when one presses one’s hands into one’s eyes is “an entropic phenomenon called a ‘pressure phosphene’ and it’s a result of stimulating your retinal ganglion cells.” He also shared that it’s sometimes called “prisoner’s cinema” by those in the darkness of jail.

The stimulation of these cells need not be manual: phosphenes can also result from magnetic fields, radiation, drugs, standing too quickly, or other conditions. Amazingly, astronauts report seeing phosphenes, presumably due to the radiation they encounter in space.

This is evidently because the high-energy particle radiation in space, blocked for us by our atmosphere, activates the cells responsible for detecting light; while I initially assumed this meant that, in a sense, we see such radiation (in a beautiful kaleidoscopic way), another author suggests a different explanation:

These ionizing radiation-induced free radicals generate chemiluminescent photons from lipid peroxidation, which are absorbed by the photoreceptor chromophores, modify[ing] the rhodopsin molecules (bleaching) and start[ing] the photo-transduction cascade resulting in the perception of phosphene lights.

I’m sure Jack can comment further, but I would note that (1) I think phosphenes are beautiful and, in their demonstration of the lower-order processes of our perceptions, fascinating; (2) I learned the word “psychoplasticity” while reading about this; and (3) the image above is a composite of photographs of lightstick chemicals poured into a toilet; I was searching for representations of phosphenes, which I’d like to see, and it was the best I found.

Update: be sure to read the King of Joy’s excellent corrections and expansions on this subject, on his fine site or in the comment below. Thanks, Ben!

I went with Will and Matt to see Mono, a Japanese instrumental band completely unknown to me.

In several songs, their instruments merged together and grew into the loudest sound I’ve ever heard, a sound so loud and that during its duration I lost the ability to tell if it was loud or not; it had a powerful oceanic intensity, within which one could detect swells of melody and harmony but the overwhelming effect of which was a kind of collapsing of one’s senses.

This amused me: I stood smiling as my whole mind was overcome, my ears not pained but lost, disoriented, uncomprehending of scale. As a child, late at night when all was silent, I used to hear a roaring which seemed to me to be louder than all other sounds, so long as I didn’t relativize it by snapping my fingers to demonstrate its quietness. I used to think this was the sound of matter, of the universe!

Mono reminded me of it, and of the difficulty one has in contextualizing experiences at the extremities of one’s senses: the flickering brightness of absolute dark, the din of silences, the stillness within cacophony.

I regretted not being able to see any JMW Turner while in London, particularly as I tried to imagine the Houses of Lords and Commons burning, as it is in his painting above. To conjure the image was difficult, for two reasons. First, the facade of the buildings strikes me as almost perfectly beautiful and suitably stately, and secondly it has, through reproduction over the years, become as iconic a symbol of immutable governance as any structure outside of Greece. To an American, the depth of European history seems almost eternal in comparison to our own brief efforts.

The effect such scale has on one is interesting, and reminds me of what Distorte’s post on Turner called to mind some time ago: the relationship between scale, perception, and cognition. While in London, I spoke briefly with the groom of the wedding about the problem of cyan and noted that in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, one never encounters the color blue; it is as though the Greeks simply didn’t see it, describing the sea as “wine dark” and focusing their descriptions on “rosy-fingered dawn,” for example. Blue, I have read, is one of the last colors we have come to differentiate mentally, while red, black, and yellow were among the first.

The groom, a classicist among other specialties, mentioned too that hues are never the focus of ancient texts; intensity is, so that darkness and lightness are described without reference to actual color. Of course, it is not biological change that has altered our perception but the development of our cognition: an amazing thing to consider.

One often hears that dogs “see in black and white,” which is of course nonsensical: dogs’ eyes do not perform the rather artificial conversion of the visible light spectrum to grayscale; only recent inventions like chemical photography, television, and digital processing do. Instead, their eyes take in the same wavelengths that ours do but their brains do not seem to differentiate between them: just as your mind effortlessly fills in the gap left by true cyan on your monitor, theirs papers over the various hues and focuses on intensity (and other sense perceptions).

The processing of sensory data, itself raw and natural, in the brain is driven less by biology than by something else, but it is hard to say just what: why did humanity become attentive to blue some thousands of years ago? Why were we previously not? It is as though the sky and sea in their infinity were too dull to differentiate: better to focus on the colors of the Earth.

It is worth considering how visual art both reflects and alters the development of our perceptual capacities. Reading how people of the past related to their painting is astonishing: what to us seems flat and mannered and false to them seemed as real as a film; without a doubt, people after us will regard the succession of thirty still images each second, flashed two-dimensionally, as an absurdly unconvincing depiction of reality. What is impossible to imagine is what else, if anything, there is to see, what other gaps remain in our sense cognition, what colors remain perceived but unseen, taken into the eye but unassembled into the synthetic idea we experience as color.

It seems of note that we are generally incapable, in recollection or in recreation, to capture the entirety of what we perceive. What is as notable and is often demonstrated in amusing optical illusions is that our brains seem determined, almost like gently doting parents, to spare us from recognizing what is absent: diligently, the mind fills in blind spots and assigns depth and texture and calculates values not present, and this sort of automatic assistance accompanies everything from perception to cognition to emotion.

Above is one of my favorite optical phenomena; the result is stunning and the gap it exposes almost embarrassing, particularly if you like to take photographs: called “The Eclipse of Mars,” it demonstrates that monitors, no matter their caliber, simply do not display any color like pure cyan. This iteration comes from Skytopia:

1. “Stare at the white dot in the centre of the red circle for at least two minutes; stay focused on the white dot.
2. You’ll start to see a thin rim of light around the edge. Don’t stop staring at the dot! Wait another minute, keeping your head perfectly still.
3. After two minutes, very slowly move your head backwards, making sure to keep your eyes focused on the dot. The circle’s rim will glow brilliantly with true cyan! [Rephrased a bit]”

The fact that there exists this color that your monitor cannot display (note the chart of ordinary cyan-to-blue below) is a mystery: have you ever looked at a photograph online and thought, “No, that’s missing a key color?” Don’t the landscapes and skies all seem totally complete, marvelous, rich, full? And yet they cannot have this crucial color, and your mind simply fills in what your medium lacks!

This seems to me more than amusing. One’s mind is determined to conceal gaps in perception, thought, and emotion with whatever is at hand and to do so without, as it were, alerting you. Doesn’t this seem incredible, almost like a metaphor for pure ignorance and our natural aversion to it, proof that we cannot be relied upon to meaningfully see through, so to speak, our technologies and media?

A Rye Field (1878), by Ivan Shishkin.

Looking at Distorte’s post of J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, I was reminded of an elemental part of painting: it does not recreate reality, but reality as we see it. It is for this reason that Impressionism was both controversial and triumphant: in abandoning one form of isomorphism (the geometric and linear fidelity that characterized more realistic painting), it pursued a facet of the visual that had less to do with reality and more to do with how humans see.

We tend to think that we see reality, but as Schrödinger emphasizes in Mind and Matter, what we see has much more to do with our optical cognition than with any qualities of the physical world. To take a common example, the resolution of our vision is such that we perceive objects as solid although they are almost entirely space, empty vacuum around very tiny elementary particles.

In other words: the world is almost entirely void, but you perceive solids and their surfaces in your cogitated (in some sense imagined) sensory way. Your perception is creative; it generates a visual dimension where reality offers only waves of energy, empty lattices of atoms, and the like. Schrödinger says that your “sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves.”

Analogies to painting are not hard to conjure; as popular a scene as that in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which the character Cameron seems lost in the composition of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, presents us with an example of the mysteries of scale and emergence. What is remarkable isn’t that Seurat’s pointillism achieves meaning in the aggregation of those tiny points of color, but that our entire visual world works that way.

(The scene works because such mysteries fascinate us all. How do the points of color come together to make a sky and the people beneath it? How do the moments of our days come together to make our lives? How do the cells of our bodies come together to make us? And how do the tiny and unreliable particles beneath it all combine into this, this world of wonder and meaning?).

Even such contemporary work as later Chuck Close (whom we might term “post-pointillist”) possess this fascination with creating something on our scale -human faces- from something much smaller: the almost cellular masses of color he arranges variously.

The Shishkin above seems at that scale to be a photograph, which is no truer to the fundamental (non-human, unperceived) reality than is a painting. Thus it too moves along this continuum of scales and styles, mass and motion, structure and sensation.

(See here for a larger version).

I like it when you’re on your back, facing the sky on a bright day with calmly moving clouds, and one blocks the sun. Your skin cools and you feel the instantaneous effect of the darkness; sometimes you hear wind in the grass, as though it had been too hot for the stalks to blow until the shade came. Then, gradually, as the cloud drifts out of the sun’s way, the color you see through your eyelids, which mask light but not vision*, begins to change:

From black to grey to dark orange to bright red, a flashing and intense red accompanied by the renewed heat on your skin and the flush of your breath from your chest. The red gets brighter and brighter, the sun hotter and hotter, and it seems that it might never stop getting brighter and hotter. Then, when it settles into a stable intensity of heat and light, your marvelous tissues and organs get down the business of regulating your temperature: new waves of sweat, new idle twists of the legs or arms.

(*I’d like to try to describe what happens when I close my eyes and push into them with my hands: masses of electric purple dots, flashing orange and green rhombuses, the sense of falling into a tunnel of beautiful mosaics).