Seeing is believing? | Life consequences & visual illusions
Photo by: won7ders
Some things have to be believed to be seen. — Ralph Hodgson on ESP
How many times have you heard the “Seeing is Believing” expression? 2 times, 3 times? Oh, a couple hundred times… OK, but do you believe in it? Affirm, if you wish, that seeing is believing, but if you do, realize what the implications are and prepare yourself to live with them. If you don’t know what the implications are, let me point out a few of them.
First, you’d better make up your mind that you will never be a scientist. That may sound like a weird thing to say because we commonly think that scientists are the individuals who believe only what they see. But scientists are far more creative and far more imaginative than that! They are the people who are saying to us nowadays that “if you believe only what you see, you won’t see very much and you won’t believe very much.”
For example, did you know that protons and electrons, the stuff of which matter is made, have never been seen or touched? But we know they exist. We know they exist only because they hold together in a kind of schema which is itself a mental concept.
Science is far from being a matter of believing only what you see. Science is the discipline of believing and then seeing through that belief. And you don’t even have to trust me on this one, because it is one of the greatest scientists who tells us that.
Einstein said that it all begins in an attitude of wonder which is not far from faith. He says that astronomy began not when someone looked at a star through a telescope, but when someone said, “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.”
Second, if you’re planning on becoming a creative artist, you’d better abandon that plan - or drop the “seeing is believing” belief. Fact is, you’ll never be a creative artist if you take seeing as a foundation for your beliefs.
Creativity means bringing into being something that was not there before. You’re now reading a post which didn’t exist yesterday.
Robert Frost, an often quoted American poet, loved to say, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
Flannery O’Connor, the great American novelist from Georgia, says about one of her short stories, “I didn’t know how it was going to come out. I had to discover how it was going to end.” Same is valid for poetry too, as Cecil Day-Lewis, the late poet laureate, says that poetry is not the expression of truth in verse, it is the discovery of truth in verse.
In creativity, believing is seeing.
The third implication is one that is relevant and important for everyone. If “seeing is believing” is your creed, then you’d better get ready for some very superficial relationships, because those are the only kind you are going to get.
That’s because only trust can reveal who a person really is.
Trust is faith. Faith is belief.
Think about who knows you best. It’s the people who trust you and whom you trust, isn’t it?Absolutely, because if I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me, you are never going to know me because I am never going to show you who I am. When we are met with suspicion or hostility we can hardly express ourselves at all.
A few posts back I wrote about getting to know our closed ones better, because the good things in life are other people. How can we do that is we lack trust? Without trust, there are only superficial relationships.
Lastly, “seeing is believing” doesn’t create leaders. Leadership doesn’t say, “prove it to me and then I’ll give you my support.” Leadership says, “you don’t have to prove it to me; with faith and trust and openness, we can make this work.”
To put it shortly: believing is a way of seeing.
That is for the “unseen” aspect of it. Now let’s get a little into the more palpable side of “seeing is believing.”
In the picture below, look at the spot that seems to rotate. What color does it have? OK, now look at that cross in the middle, what color does the rotating spot have now? Focus on the center cross without moving your eyes; where did all those pink spots go?
Can you trust what you see? Definitely not.
Created by Jeremy L. Hinton ca. 2005 as "Lilac Chaser"
There are two illusions at work in the above animation:
- Afterimage. An afterimage is a visual impression that remains in the retina after the initial stimulus is removed. The afterimage always has colors that are complementary to those of the original image.
- Retinal fatigue. This occurs when the afterimage of an object cancels the stimulus of the object on the retina. The effect is most pronounced when the objects do not have well-defined edges that are detectable by small eye movements.
“Seeing is believing” creates individuals who are easy to manipulate, as most perceptions can be easily altered. It is also counter productive and limiting.
Look beyond what you know and see, because there’s where the really good stuff is waiting to be found.
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Hi Armannd, I think you have picked another interesting topic to discuss about. Seeing the poll results, I’m a little surprise to see more people are unsure than believe that seeing is believing.
At the moment the voting results are somewhat irrelevant, because there aren’t too many votes; but we’ll wait and see what higher numbers have to say.