augmented illusions

Ever since the captcha became common place as a means to fight spam on blogs and in social media environments, there have been complaints against them by those who use screen readers to access the internet. So it’s great news, as reported on the cre-aid blog, that there is a Dutch language audio captcha in the works. Even better than that, you can go here to add your voiced numerals to help make that a reality.

Shot from the “Huntum” appartment block. I’m posting this especially for @T: he and I both lived in the Bijlmer, but never met up…

Recently I’ve been exploring the world sight almost unseen. One thing that impressed me, apart from not being able to find my way out of the supermarket, was the difference in experience. The quality of that difference seemed to be entirely mental; indeed, like having to rewire my brain. All visual mental habits, acquired in a lifetime of being a sighted animal now became meaningless, as new mental concepting needed to replace that. In reading up on this ( a natural habit in times of need) I happened on an Oliver Sacks article, written for The Newyorker. In it he explores what happens, at a cerebral level, if sight has to be replaced by other senses. What happens to the visual cortex, he asks, a part of the brain that is supposed to map the visual senses as a fixed cerebral location? He traces the experiences of a number of individuals:

Two years after becoming completely blind, Hull had apparently become so nonvisual as to resemble someone who had been blind from birth. Hull’s loss of visuality also reminded me of the sort of “cortical blindness” that can happen if the primary visual cortex is damaged, through a stroke or traumatic brain damage—although in Hull’s case there was no direct damage to the visual cortex but, rather, a cutting off from any visual stimulation or input.
In a profoundly religious way, and in language sometimes reminiscent of that of St. John of the Cross, Hull enters into this state, surrenders himself, with a sort of acquiescence and joy. And such “deep” blindness he conceives as “an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own. . . . Being a whole-body seer is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions.”
Being a “whole-body seer,” for Hull, means shifting his attention, his center of gravity, to the other senses, and he writes again and again of how these have assumed a new richness and power. Thus he speaks of how the sound of rain, never before accorded much attention, can now delineate a whole landscape for him, for its sound on the garden path is different from its sound as it drums on the lawn, or on the bushes in his garden, or on the fence dividing it from the road. “Rain,” he writes, “has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience . . . presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once . . . gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another.”

Interestingly though, this is not the whole story, because from other autobiographies different stories arise. Like that of Zoltan Torey, who replaced actual vision by highly detailed mental vision, the “inner eye” as Torey himself calls it. And like Torey, Sabriye Tenberken:

Turning eagerly toward the lake, Tenberken saw, in her mind’s eye, “a beach of crystallized salt shimmering like snow under an evening sun, at the edge of a vast body of turquoise water. . . . And down below, on the deep green mountain flanks, a few nomads were watching their yaks grazing.” But it then turns out that she has been facing in the wrong direction, not “looking” at the lake at all, and that she has been “staring” at rocks and a gray landscape. These disparities don’t faze her in the least—she is happy to have so vivid a visual imagination.

All this seems to suggest to Sacks, that the visual cortex can be re-allocated to the other senses, and that synesthesia plays an important part in this remapping. Indeed, how the visual cortext “produces” visual experiences as the precursor of all other senses.

Sacks’ account spoke profoundly to me as I had just been experiencing myself the first signs of the cerebral remapping he writes about. Also, it connects strongly to visual habits I have been refining throughout much of my adult life: the intense and detailed visualisations that Tibetan buddhism demands of its practitioners. Visualisations of form, of architectural spaces and of movement through those spaces. Indeed, these visualisations that, in experienced practitioners, arise instantaneously, are the fabric of enlightenment itself. It is obvious that all this processing must have an effect on the visual cortex. Lately I’ve started to visualize my own environment like the 3D mandalas of vajrayana buddhist practice. On reading Sacks’s notes I realized that my experience was entirely in line with his description of synesthesia and re-allocation. So that’s what rewiring the brain is like.

Simple visual imagery such as [Galton] describes may suffice for the design of a screw, an engine, or a surgical operation, and it may be relatively easy to model these essentially reproductive forms of imagery or to simulate them by constructing video games or virtual realities of various sorts. Such powers may be invaluable, but there is something passive and mechanical and impersonal about them, which makes them utterly different from the higher and more personal powers of the imagination, where there is a continual struggle for concepts and form and meaning, a calling upon all the powers of the self. Imagination dissolves and transforms, unifies and creates, while drawing upon the “lower” powers of memory and association. It is by such imagination, such “vision,” that we create or construct our individual worlds.

• singing "jovano jovanke" #