Sunday, March 23, 2014

Perspective

Perspective, life is really all about perspective. I got thinking about that yesterday when I went to do the grocery shopping without gamer son, and with my new contact lenses in. Can't see the connection? Well, with my new contacts, I see the world the same way every other person with normal vision does.

That means that everything to me is enlarged, and it created some unexpected problems. I found that when I select the things that I buy every week, I go by their size. Not by the size on the side of the packaging, but by the visual size. And because everything is now enlarged to me, I found myself second guessing. Everything just looked too big, and I spent a few minutes wondering if for some reason the items I usually purchase were repackaged into bigger sizes. I will add that my quandary was caused by items that come in multiple sizes...

I did realise before very long what was happening, but I still had no idea which of these suddenly bigger items were the ones I usually buy. It was an unexpected problem because while these items looked suddenly larger, so did everything else, so they should have been easy to figure out in relation to everything else. But that was not the case. My brain has clearly been conditioned to the sizes I am used to seeing and it just could not make the distinction between old size and new size.

It was an odd time, and that was how I started thinking about perspective. Not really something I recommend doing while also selecting grocery items and keeping a mental running total so as not to go over budget. However my mind so often goes off on a mental path by itself that I just let it go, and my musings became the script inside my head while the more practical part of me was adding up totals and being astonished and horrified by the price of oranges.

Perspective can mean many things. I started thinking about the perspective by which we see the world through our eyes. This is affected by many things, vision being the most obvious. But also I think what we see is influenced by many factors. When you start learning about how the brain interprets the signals it receives from the eye it can cause a bit of an overload. Well for me it did anyway. I immediately started thinking about the fact that the  brain is merely translating what the optic nerve sends it, and compensating for things like the blind spot that all people have (didn't know that? We do, it's the spot on the retina where the optical nerve connects the retina to the brain. At this spot there are no light detecting cells and thus a blind spot. When both eyes look at the same thing often one will pick up what the other misses, and the brain compensates by 'whiting out' that blind spot. The brain is an amazing organ, and the way it compensates for various things - such as the world shrinking and the way with strong corrective lenses the edges of vision are pulled up but in a few days flatten again as the brain corrects this - is simply amazing.) From there I started thinking what if? Like what if what the brain thinks we see is not what is really there but is only an interpretation of what it thinks the eye has sent it, and that has been tampered with - and my brain started to implode.

There are many scary but mathematical explanations (maths is scary) about how we see and it sent my imagination into overdrive until it was more like overload. Even the way we 'see' colours sent my imagination off into the cosmos. Colour is light of different wavelengths and frequencies and I listened to a super intelligent person called Brian Cox, who is a particle physicist, explain how colour appears as it does to us and it basically reformed my understanding of the entire universe.

But I digress. Even if two people are standing together they will not see the exact same thing. Well they will, but they will each focus on something different and phase out different things. Certain details get overlooked, others become more of a focus. As an example of what I am trying to say here, say there are two people looking at a plant. One loves flowers and the other is fascinated by bugs. So, one person will see the flower on the plant and maybe miss altogether that there is a caterpillar on one of the leaves. The other will focus on the caterpillar and maybe not notice much about the flower. When asked later he or she may only remember that it was red.

Our eyes are not perfect, and our brains do not give the same attention to all of the detail (not including here people who are trained to notice everything about a scene). When we look at something we often see only a part of it and the brain simply skims over the rest. This, in a very roundabout way, brings me back to perspective. What we see depends on many factors - eyesight, interest, personality, experiences to mention only a few. So nobody sees a scene in exactly the same way.

For me, I have spent enough months not wearing contact lenses that the shrunken world visible through my glasses became normal to me. Now I must adjust to this enlarged world, which is in fact what most people see. But to me, my previous view was normal. As a child, my blurred vision was normal. We all think that how we see things, our perspective, is normal. We think that everyone else sees things the same way. A colour-blind person thinks a washed out world is normal and can't imagine it any other way. A person who is not colour blind cannot imagine what that other person sees - unless shown a photo.

Perspective, each of us has a different view on the world, in every way. And we should all of us understand that every single person on this earth is a unique individual, with a one of a kind view of the world both externally and internally. We are different, every single one of us; like snowflakes there is not a single person exactly the same as another. We should celebrate our own unique perspective of the world and we should celebrate everyone else's. We are all unique and that is the wonder of this world, it should never be a problem.




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