The Conquest of Illusion: Is What We See Real? by JJ van der Leeuw (review)

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The Conquest of Illusion:Is What We See Real?

II. Sheldrake: Minds Beyond BrainsIII. Harding: Headless SeeingIV. Cézanne and Neuroscience

JJ van der Leeuw published "The Conquest of Illusion" in 1928, with a dedication to J.Krishnamurti and in memory of Krishnamurti's brother Nityananda. Richard Rose, who hada profound self-realization experience in 1947 at the age of 30, came across the book in thelate 1950s, when it was recommended to him by a cab driver in Los Angeles who also toldhim about Alfred Pulyan. Rose recommended the book to his students, along with books byHartmann, Santanelli, Ouspensky, Merrell-Wolff, Brunton and others.

Among the valuable insights that van der Leeuw spelled out in the book, his second-chapteranalysis of how we see stands out to me as one of the most provocative. He leads the readerstep by step, in a simple yet complete fashion, to the inevitable mystery of sense perception –and to what can profitably be a "doubt sensation" about the relation of our perceptions toreality. He illustrates his analysis with a series of plates which I've included on this pagealong with some summary comments.

In the first plate, van der Leeuw depicts the conventional understanding of an external worldthat we perceive accurately. In other words, our consciousness presents us with an exact replica

Conquest of Illusion http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/Conquest.htm

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of the outside world. He titles this a primitive idea of sense perception, so he obviously has anexplanation in store that he considers less primitive.

He begins the exploration by going into the physiology of sense perception, particularly thesense of sight. The physiologist tells us that light rays are reflected off objects in the outsideworld, creating vibrations that hit the rods and cones in the eye. That in turn causes chemicaland electric changes to be transmitted along the optic nerves to the brain. And somewhere in ourconsciousness, an image forms, as depicted in plate two:

If we scrutinized the brain with our sense perception, or with equipment designed to enhancethat capability, we would detect chemical and electrical changes – but nowhere would be findan image with color, shape, texture, etc. And that is the great mystery of sense perception. Theimage that we "see" depends on our interpretation of cellular changes. Van der Leeuw pointsout that, for all we know, what triggered the image may be "a mathematical point, having withinitself certain properties which, reacting on a human consciousness, produce there the differentqualities which make up the image ... as we see it."

And there is another function in addition tointerpretation that we're adding to the process:"We think we are perceiving as an objectivereality that which we are projecting as an imagein the world of our consciousness." Every imagethat we see in our consciousness we projectoutside ourselves and pretend that we're seeingthat image outside.

In plate three, The World of My Consciousness,van der Leeuw "complicates" the picture a bitby reminding us that we know the vibrations,the body, the eye, the optic nerve, and the brainby this same process of sense perception as we


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Conquest of IllusionJ J Van Der Leeu

know a cat or a tree. And everything we knowby sense perception is in the world that we'requestioning – the world of the unknown. Therelation of the image that we see to what actually triggers the perception (and projection) isunknown.

The world we see around us is, in fact, an imagearising in our consciousness. But if we comparenotes with our fellow-beings, we find that there is agreat similarity of interpretation between the treewe see and that our neighbors see. There must be acommon source providing the stimulus thatproduces these compatible images in ourselves andour neighbors. Van der Leeuw terms this source theworld of the real, and in the fourth plate headdresses the question of the relationship of theworld of the real to the individual consciousnessworlds.

Butwhereis thisworldof thereal?Usingthe

allegory of the cave from Plato's Republic, van derLeeuw illustrates in plate five how the productionof our world image is projected through an openingin the center of our consciousness. "Instead of beingaware that they act on us from within," however,"we gaze upon the image ... and wonder how itinfluences us from without."

The teaching of self-realized men throughouthistory has centered around their personaltestimony that it's possible to follow the ray ofprojection back to its source, to the world of thereal. And by transcending our identification withthe world of individual consciousness, we find thesolution to the problem of life. When we enter theworld of the real, we return to our real home,simultaneously finding our true identity and the answer to all the questions of life and death.


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You can find a digital version of "The Conquest of Illusion" at Spiritual Books WorthReading or purchase a new or used copy by clicking on the Amazon link at the left. (If thegraphic isn't displaying information about the book, click on your browser's "refresh" or"reload" icon. In any case, clicking on the Amazon button will take you to the right place.)

and BookFinder.com are other good sources of new and used books.

II. MINDS BEYOND BRAINS:RECENT EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

By Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.

Where are our minds located? We have been brought up to believe that they areinside our heads, that mental activity is nothing but brain activity. Instead, I suggestthat our minds extend far beyond our brains; they stretch out through fields that linkus to our environment and to each other.

Mental fields are rooted in brains, just as magnetic fields around magnets are rootedin the magnets themselves, or just as the fields of transmission around mobile phonesare rooted in the phones and their internal electrical activities. As magnetic fieldsextend around magnets, and electromagnetic fields around mobile phones, so mentalfields extend around brains.

Mental fields help to explain telepathy, the sense of being stared at and otherwidespread but unexplained abilities. Above all, mental fields underlie normalperception. They are an essential part of vision.

IMAGES OUTSIDE OUR HEADS

Look around you now. Are the images of what you see inside your brain? Or are theyoutside you – just where they seem to be?

According to the conventional theory, there is a one-way process: light moves in, butnothing is projected out. The inward movement of light is familiar enough. As youlook at this page, reflected light moves from the page through the electromagneticfield into your eyes. The lenses of your eyes focus the light to form upside-downimages on your retinas. This light falling on your retinal rod and cone cells causeselectrical changes within them, which trigger off patterned changes in the nerves ofthe retina. Nerve impulses move up your optic nerves and into the brain, where theygive rise to complex patterns of electrical and chemical activity. So far, so good. Allthese processes can be, and have been, studied in great detail by neurophysiologistsand other experts on vision and brain activity.

But then something very mysterious happens. You consciously experience what youare seeing, the page in front of you. You also become conscious of the printed wordsand their meanings. From the point of view of the standard theory, there is no reasonwhy you should be conscious at all. Brain mechanisms ought to go on just as wellwithout consciousness.

Then comes a further problem. When you see this page, you do not experience yourimage of it as being inside your brain, where it is supposed to be. Instead, you


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experience its image as being located about two feet in front of you. The image isoutside your body.

For all its physiological sophistication, the standard theory has no explanation foryour most immediate and direct experience. All your experience is supposed to beinside your brain, a kind of virtual reality show inside your head. That means yourskull must lie beyond everything you are seeing: if you look at the sky, your skullmust be beyond the sky! This seems an absurd idea, but it seems to be a necessaryimplication of the mind-in-brain theory.

The idea I am proposing is so simple that it is hard to grasp. Your image of this pageis just where it seems to be, in front of your eyes, not behind your eyes. It is notinside your brain, but outside your brain.

Thus vision involves both an inward movement of light, and an outward projection ofimages. Through mental fields our minds reach out to touch what we are looking at.If we look at a mountain ten miles away, our minds stretch out ten miles. If we gazeat distant stars our minds reach out into the heavens, over literally astronomicaldistances.

THE SENSE OF BEING STARED AT

Sometimes when I look at someone from behind, he or she turns and looks straight atme. And sometimes I suddenly turn around and find someone staring at me. Surveysshow that more than 90% of people have had experiences such as these. The sense ofbeing stared at should not occur if attention is all inside the head. But if it stretchesout and links us to what we are looking at, then our looking could affect what welook at. Is it just an illusion, or does the sense of being stared at really exist?

This question can be explored through simple, inexpensive experiments. People workin pairs. One person, the subject, sits with his or her back to the other, wearing ablind-fold. The other person, the looker, sits behind the subject, and in a randomseries of trials either looks at the subject's neck, or looks away and think of somethingelse. The beginning of each trial is signalled by a mechanical clicker or bleeper. Eachtrial lasts about ten seconds and the subject guesses out loud "looking" or "notlooking". Detailed instructions are given on my website, www.sheldrake.org. Morethan 100,000 trials have now been carried out, and the results are overwhelminglypositive and hugely significant statistically, with odds against chance of quadrillionsto one. The sense of being stared at even works when people are looked at throughclosed-circuit TV. Animals are also sensitive to being looked at by people, andpeople by animals. This sensitivity to looks seems widespread in the animal kingdomand may well have evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships: an animalthat sensed when an unseen predator was staring would stand a better chance ofsurviving than an animal without this sense.

TELEPATHY

Educated people have been brought up to believe that telepathy does not exist. Likeother so-called psychic phenomena, it is dismissed as an illusion.

Most people who espouse these opinions, which I used to myself, do not do so onthe basis of a close examination of the evidence. They do so because there is a taboo


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against taking telepathy seriously. This taboo is related to the prevailing paradigm ormodel of reality within institutional science, namely the mind-inside-the-braintheory, according to which telepathy and other psychic phenomena, which seem toimply mysterious kinds of 'action at a distance', cannot possibly exist.

This taboo dates back at least as far as the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenthcentury. But this is not the place to examine its history (which I discuss in The Senseof Being Stared At). Rather I want to summarize some recent experiments, whichsuggest that telepathy not only exists, but that it is a normal part of animalcommunication.

PSYCHIC PETS

I first became interested in the subject of telepathy some fifteen years ago, and startedlooking at evidence for telepathy in the animals we know best, namely pets. I sooncame across numerous stories from owners of dogs, cats, parrots, horses and otheranimals that suggested that these animals seemed able to read their minds andintentions.

Through public appeals I have built up a large database of such stories, currentlycontaining more than 5,000 case histories. These stories fall into several categories.For example, many cat owners say that their animals seem to sense when they areplanning to take them to the vet, even before they have taken out the carrying basketor given any apparent clue as to their intention. Some people say their dogs knowwhen they are going to be taken for a walk, even when they are in a different room,out of sight or hearing, and when the person is merely thinking about taking them fora walk. Of course, no one finds this behaviour surprising if it happens at a routinetime, or if the dogs see the person getting ready to go out, or hear the word "walk".They think it is telepathic because it seems to happen in the absence of such clues.

One of the commonest and most testable claims about dogs and cats is that theyknow when their owners are coming home, in some cases anticipating their arrival byten minutes or more. In random household surveys in Britain and America, mycolleagues and I have found that approximately 50% of dog owners and 30% of catowners believe that their animals anticipate the arrival of a member of the household.Through hundreds of videotaped experiments, my colleagues and I have shown thatdogs react to their owners' intentions to come home even when they are many milesaway, even when they return at randomly-chosen times, and even when they travel inunfamiliar vehicles such as taxis. Telepathy seems the only hypothesis that canaccount for the facts. (For more details, see my book Dogs that Know When theirOwners Are Coming Home, And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.)

TELEPHONE TELEPATHY

In the course of my research on unexplained powers of animals, I heard of dozens ofdogs and cats that seemed to anticipate telephone calls from their owners. Forexample, when the telephone rings in the household of a noted professor at theUniversity of California at Berkeley, his wife knows when her husband is on theother end of the line because Whiskins, their silver tabby cat, rushes to the telephoneand paws at the receiver. "Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook andmakes appreciative miaws that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end",she says. "If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice." The cat responds


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even when he telephones home from field trips in Africa or South America.

This led me to reflect that I myself had had this kind of experience, in that I hadthought of people for no apparent reason who, shortly thereafter, called. I asked myfamily and friends if they had ever had this experience, and I soon found the majoritywere very familiar with it. Some said they knew when their mother or boyfriend orother significant person was calling because the phone sounded different!

Through extensive surveys, my colleagues and I have found that the most people havehad seemingly telepathic experiences with telephone calls. Indeed this is thecommonest kind of apparent telepathy in the modern world.

Is this all a matter of coincidence, and selective memory, whereby people onlyremember when someone they were thinking about rang, and forget all the times theywere wrong? Most sceptics assume that this is the case, but until recently there hadnever been any scientific research on the subject at all.

I have developed a simple experiment to test for telephone telepathy. Participantsreceive a call from one of four different callers at a prearranged time, and theythemselves choose the callers, usually close friends or family members. For each test,the caller is picked at random by the experimenter by throwing a die. The participanthas to say who the caller is before the caller says anything. If people were justguessing, they would be right about one time in four, or 25% of the time.

We have so far conducted more than 800 such trials, and the average success rate is42%, very significantly above the chance level of 25%, with astronomical oddsagainst chance (1026 to 1).

We have also carried out a series of trials in which two of the four callers werefamiliar, while the other two were strangers, whose names the participants knew, butwhom they had not met. With familiar callers, the success rate was 56 %, highlysignificant statistically. With strangers it was at the chance level, in agreement withthe observation that telepathy typically takes place between people who shareemotional or social bonds.

In addition, we have found that these effects do not fall off with distance. Some ofour participants were from Australia or New Zealand, and they could identify whowas calling just as well as with people down under as with people only a few milesaway.

EXTENDED MINDS

Laboratory studies by parapsychologists have already provided significant statisticalevidence for telepathy (well reviewed by Dean Radin in his book The ConsciousUniverse, Harper, San Francisco, 1997). But most laboratory research has givenrather weak effects, probably because most participants and "senders" were strangersto each other, and telepathy normally depends on social bonds.

The results of telephone telepathy experiments give much stronger and morerepeatable effects because they involve people who know each other well. I have alsofound that there are striking telepathic links between nursing mothers and theirbabies. Likewise, the telepathic reactions of pets to their owners depend on strong


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The Sense of Being StaredAt

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social bonds.

I suggest that these bonds are aspects of the fields that link together members ofsocial groups (which I call morphic fields) and which act as channels for the transferof information between separated members of the group. Telepathy literally means"distant feeling", and typically involves the communication of needs, intentions anddistress. Sometimes the telepathic reactions are experienced as feelings, sometimes asvisions or the hearing of voices, and sometimes in dreams. Many people and petshave reacted when people they are bonded to have had an accident, or are dying,even if this is happening many miles away.

There is an analogy for this process in quantum physics: if two particles have beenpart of the same quantum system and are separated in space, they retain a mysteriousconnectedness. When Einstein first realized this implication of quantum theory, hethought quantum theory must be wrong because it implied what he called a "spookyaction at a distance". Experiments have shown that quantum theory is right andEinstein wrong. A change in one separated part of a system can affect anotherinstantaneously. This phenomenon is known as quantum non-locality ornon-separability.

Telepathy, like the sense of being stared at, is only paranormal if we define as"normal" the theory that the mind is confined to the brain. But if our minds reach outbeyond our brains, just as they seem to, and connect with other minds, just as theyseem to, then phenomena like telepathy and the sense of being stared at seem normal.They are not spooky and weird, on the margins of abnormal human psychology, butare part of our biological nature.

Of course, I am not saying that the brain is irrelevant to our understanding of themind. It is very relevant, and recent advances in brain research have much to tell us.Our minds are centred in our bodies, and in our brains in particular. However, thatthey are not confined to our brains, but extend beyond them. This extension occursthrough the fields of the mind, or mental fields, which exist both within and beyondour brains.

The idea of the extended mind makes better sense of our experiencethan the mind-in-brain theory. Above all, it liberates us. We are nolonger imprisoned within the narrow compass of our skulls, ourminds separated and isolated from each other. We are no longeralienated from our bodies, from our environment and from otherpeople. We are interconnected.

© Rupert Sheldrake 2006. Dr. Sheldrake is a biologist and authorof "The Sense of Being Stared at, and Other Aspects of theExtended Mind." He is a Fellow of the Institute of NoeticSciences, near San Francisco, and Director of the Perrott-Warrick Research Project, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge.He lives in London with his wife, Jill Purce, and their two sons. His web site iswww.sheldrake.org. The above synopsis is from a talk given by Sheldrake at theSeptember 2006 "Just For The health Of It" Prophets Conference in Vancouver,Canada.


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III. ON HAVING NO HEAD: CONFIRMED BY THESCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF PERCEPTION

By Douglas E. Harding

All this, however clearly given in first-hand experience [i.e., the fact that from thefirst-person vs. the third-person point of view the seer has no head - Ed.] appearsnevertheless wildly paradoxical, an affront to common-sense. It is also an affront toscience, which is said to be only common-sense tidied up somewhat? Anyhow, thescientist has his own story of how I see some things (such as your head) but notothers (such as my head): and obviously his story works. The question is: can he putmy head [which I see only in a mirror or other reflective surface - Ed.] back on myshoulders, where people tell me it belongs?

At its briefest and plainest, his tale of how I see youruns something like this. Light leaves the sun, and eightminutes later gets to your body, which absorbs part ofit. The rest bounces off in all directions, and some of itreaches my eye, passing through the lens and formingan inverted picture of you on the screen at the back ofmy eyeball. This picture sets up chemical changes in alight-sensitive substance there, and these changesdisturb the cells (they are tiny living creatures) ofwhich the screen is built. They pass on their agitationto other, very elongated cells; and these, in turn, tocells in a certain region of my brain. It is only when

this terminus is reached, and the molecules and atoms and particles of thesebrain-cells are affected, that I see you or anything else. And the same is true of theother senses; I neither see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor feel anything at all untilthe converging stimuli actually arrive, after the most drastic changes and delays, atthis centre. It is only at this terminus, this moment and place of all arrivals at theGrand Central Station of my Here-Now, that the whole traffic system – what I callmy universe – springs into existence. For me, this is the time and place of all creation.

There are many odd things, infinitely remote from common-sense, about this plaintale of science. And the oddest of them is that the tale's conclusion cancels out therest of it. For it says that all I can know is what is going on here and now, at thisbrain terminal, where my world is miraculously created. I have no way of finding outwhat is going on elsewhere – in the other regions of my head, in my eyes, in theoutside world – if, indeed, there is an elsewhere, an outside world at all. The sobertruth is that my body, and your body, and everything else on Earth, and the Universeitself – as they might exist out there in themselves and in their own space,independently of me – are mere figments, not worth a second thought. There neitheris nor can be any evidence for two parallel worlds (an unknown outer or physicalworld there, plus a known inner or mental world here which mysteriously duplicatesit) but only for this one world which is always before me, and in which I can find nodivision into mind and matter, inside and outside, soul and body. It is what it'sobserved to be, no more and no less, and it's the explosion of this centre – thisterminal spot where "I" or "my consciousness" is supposed to be located – anexplosion powerful enough to fill out and become this boundless scene that's now


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On Having No HeadDOUGLAS E. HARDING...

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before me, that is me.

In brief, the scientist's story of perception, so far from contradictingmy naïve story, only confirms it. Provisionally and common-sensibly, he put a head here on my shoulders, but it was soonousted by the universe. The common-sense or unparadoxical viewof myself as an "ordinary man with a head" doesn't work at all; assoon as I examine it with any care, it turns out to be nonsense.

*

From On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious© 2002 by Douglas E. Harding. The first half of this book waspublished in the 1960s and became a worldwide classic. At age77 Harding had the final breakthrough and added "Bringing the Story Up to Date:The Eight Stages of the Headless Way." See the Greatest Teachers section of thissite for more on Harding's life and teaching.

IV. CÉZANNE & NEUROSCIENCEFrom Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer, a Columbia U. graduate and a Rhodes scholar, worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernadin. Hisbook is a fascinating study of eight artists including a painter (Cézanne), a poet, a chef, acomposer, and several novelists – showing how "each one discovered an essential truth aboutthe mind that science is only now rediscovering." In the case of Cézanne, it was about humanvision.

Understanding how sight starts, how the eyeball transforms light into an electricalcode, is one of the most satisfying discoveries of modern neuroscience. No othersense has been so dissected. We now know that vision begins with an atomicdisturbance. Particles of light alter the delicate molecular structure of the receptors inthe retina. This cellular shudder triggers a chain reaction that ends with a flash ofvoltage. The photon's energy has become information.[1]

But that code of light, as Cézanne knew,is just the start of seeing. If sight weresimply the retina's photoreceptors, thenCézanne's canvases would be nothing butmasses of indistinct color. His Provençallandscapes would consist of meaninglessalternations of olive and ocher, and hisstill lifes would be all paint and no fruit.Our world would be formless. Instead, inour evolved system, the eyeball's map of

light is transformed again and again until, milliseconds later, the canvas's descriptionenters our consciousness. Amid the swirl of color, we see the apple.

What happens during this blink of unconscious activity? The first scientific glimpseinto how the brain processes the eye's data arrived in the late 1950s, in an astonishing


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set of experiments by David Hubel and Torsten Weisel....

Before Hubel and Weisel, scientists assumed that the eye was like a camera, and thatthe brain's visual field was composed of dots of light, neatly arranged in time andspace. Just as a photograph was made up of a quilt of pixels, so must the eye create atwo-dimensional representation of reflected light that it seamlessly transmitted to thebrain. Yet when scientists tried finding this camera inside the skull, all they foundwas silence, the electrical stupor of uninterested cells.

This was a frustrating paradox. The animal clearly could see, and yet its cells, whenisolated with a beam of light, were quiet. It was as if the animal's vision was emergingfrom a blank canvas. Hubel and Weisel bravely ventured into this mystery. At first,their results only confirmed the impossibility of activating cortical neurons withindividual pricks of light. But then, by complete accident, they discovered an excitedcell, a neuron interested in the slice of world it had seen.

What was this cell responding to? Hubel and Weisel had no idea. The neuronbecame active at the exact moment it was supposed to be silent, when they were inbetween experiments. There was no light to excite it. Only after retracing their exactsteps did Hubel and Weisel figure out what had happened. As they had inserted aglass slide into the light projector, they had inadvertently cast "a faint but sharpshadow" onto the cat's retina. It was just a fleeting glint of brightness – a straight linepointed in a single direction – but it was exactly what the cell wanted.

Hubel and Weisel were stunned by their discovery. They had glimpsed the rawmaterial of vision, and it was completely abstract. Our brain cells were strange things,fascinated not by dots of light but by angles of lines.[2] These neurons preferredcontrast over brightness, edges over curves....

Cézanne's paintings echo this secret geometry of lines sensed by the visual cortex. It'sas if he broke the brain apart and saw how seeing occurs....

At the literal level of paint, Cézanne represented the landscape as nothing but a quiltof brushstrokes, each one a separate line of color ... creating the entire picture out ofpatches and strokes, les tâches and les touches....

Neuroscientists now know that what we end up seeing is highly influenced bysomething called top-down processing, a term that describes the way cortical brainlayers project down and influence (corrupt, some might say) our actual sensations.After the inputs of the eye enter the brain, they are immediately sent along twoseparate pathways, one of which is fast and one of which is slow. The fast pathwayquickly transmits a coarse and blurry picture to our prefrontal cortex, a brain regioninvolved in conscious thought. Meanwhile, the slow pathway takes a meanderingroute through the visual cortex, which begins meticulously analyzing and refining thelines of light. The slow image arrives in the prefrontal cortex about fifty millisecondsafter the fast image.

Why does the mind see everything twice? Because our visual cortex needs help. Afterthe prefrontal cortex receives its imprecise picture, the "top" of the brain quicklydecides what the "bottom" has seen and begins doctoring the sensory data....

As Cézanne aged, his


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paintings became filled by more and more naked canvas, what he eloquently callednonfinito. No one had ever done this before. The painting was clearly incomplete.How could it be art? But Cézanne was unfazed by his critics. He knew that hispaintings were only literally blank.[3] Their incompleteness was really a metaphor forthe process of sight. In these unfinished canvases, Cézanne was trying to figure outwhat the brain would finish for him. As a result, his ambiguities are exceedinglydeliberate, his vagueness predicated on precision. If Cézanne wanted us to fill in hisempty spaces, then he had to get his emptiness exactly right.

For example, look at Cézanne's watercolors of Mont Sainte-Victoire. In his finalyears, Cézanne walked every morning to the crest of Les Lauves, where an expansiveview of the Provençal plains opened up before him. He would paint in the shade of alinden tree. From there, Cézanne said, he could see the land's hidden patterns, theway the river and vineyards were arranged in overlapping planes. In the backgroundwas always the mountain, that jagged isosceles of rock that seemed to connect thedry land with the infinite sky....

And yet the mountain does not disappear. It is there, an implacable and adamantpresence. The mind easily invents the form that Cézanne's paint barely insinuates.Although the mountain is almost literally invisible – Cézanne has only implied itspresence – its looming gravity anchors the painting. We don't know where thepainting ends and we begin....

When Cézanne began his studies in the blank canvas, science had no way ofexplaining why the paintings appeared less vacant than they actually were. The veryexistence of Cézanne's nonfinito style, the fact that the brain could find meaning innothing, seemed to disprove any theory of mind that reduced our vision to pixels oflight.

The Gestalt psychologists of the early twentieth century were the first scientists toconfront the illusions of form that Cézanne so eloquently manipulated....

... The Gestaltists set out to prove that the process of seeing alters the world weobserve. Like Immanuel Kant, their philosophical precursor, they argued that muchof what was thought of as being out there – in our sensations of the outside world –actually came from in here, from inside the mind. ("The imagination" Kant wrote, "isa necessary ingredient of perception itself.") As evidence for their theories ofperception, the Gestaltists used optical illusions. These ranged from the illusion ofapparent motion in a movie (the film is really a set of static photographs flippedtwenty-four times a second) to drawings that seem to oscillate between two differentforms (the classic example is the vase that can also be seen as two faces insilhouette). According to the Gestaltists, these everyday illusions were proof thateverything we saw was an illusion. Form is dictated from the top down. Unlike theWundtians [reductionists, who argued that visual perception is ultimately reducibleto its elemental sensations - Ed.], who began with our sensory fragments, theGestaltists began with reality as we actually experienced it.

Modern neuroscientific studies of the visual cortex have confirmed the intuitions ofCézanne and the Gestaltists: visual experience transcends visual sensations.... If themind didn't impose itself on the eye, then our vision would be full of voids. Forexample, because there are no light-sensitive cones where the optic nerve connects to


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the retina, we each have a literal blind spot in the center of the visual field. But weare blind to our own blind spot: our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world.

This ability to make sense of our incomplete senses is a result of human corticalanatomy. The visual cortex is divided into distinct areas, neatly numbered 1 through5. If you trace the echoes of light from the V1, the neural area where informationfrom the retina first appears as a collection of lines, to the V5 you can watch thevisual scene acquire its unconscious creativity. Reality is continually refined, untilthe original sensation – that incomplete canvas – is swallowed by our subjectivity.

The first area in the visual cortex where neurons respond to both illusory and actualimagery is the V2. It is here that the top part of the mind begins altering the lowerlevels of sight. As a result, we begin to see a mountain where there is only a thinblack line. From this point on, we can't separate our own mental inventions fromwhat really exists. The exact same neurons respond when we actually see a mountainand when we just imagine a mountain. There is no such thing as immaculateperception....

What is the moral of all these anatomy lessons? The mind is not a camera. AsCézanne understood, seeing is imagining. The problem is that there is no way toquantify what we think we see. Each of us is locked inside our own peculiar vision. Ifwe removed our self-consciousness from the world, if we saw with the impersonalhonesty of our eyeballs, then we would see nothing but lonely points of light,glittering in a formless space. There would be no mountain. The canvas would simplybe empty....

The shocking fact is that sight is like art. What we see is not real. It has been bent tofit our canvas, which is the brain. When we open our eyes, we enter into an illusoryworld, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex. Just as apainter interprets a picture, we interpret our sensations. But no matter how preciseour neuronal maps become, they will never solve the question of what we actuallysee, for sight is a private phenomenon. The visual experience transcends the pixels ofthe retina and the fragmentary lines of the visual cortex.

[1] The electrical message of photoreceptors is actually the absence of an electrical message, asthe photons cause the sodium ion channels inside our photoreceptors to close, which causes thecell to become hyperpolarized. Eyes speak with silence.

[2] The early parts of our visual cortex are stimulated by visual inputs that look very similar to aPiet Mondrian painting. Mondrian, a painter extremely influenced by Cézanne, spent his lifesearching for what he called "the constant truths concerning forms." He eventually settled on thestraight line as the essence of his art. He was right, at least from the perspective of the V1 [thefirst stage of the visual cortex].

[3] As Gertrude Stein said of one of these Cézanne landscapes, "Finished or unfinished, it alwayswas what looked like the very essence of an oil painting, because everything was there."

WHO IN THE BRAIN IS LOOKING?

… Nobel laureate Richard Axel's lab engineered a fruit fly


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with a glowing brain, each of its neurons like a little neon light. This wasdone through the careful insertion of a fluorescent protein in all of theinsect's olfactory nerves. But the glow wasn't constant. Axel engineered thefly so that the fluorescent protein turned itself on only when calcium was

present in high concentrations inside the cell (active neurons have more calcium). Usingsome fancy microscopy, Axel's lab group was able to watch-in real time-the patterns ofactivity within the fly brain whenever it experienced an odor. They could trace the ascent ofthe smell, how it began as a flicker in a receptor and within milliseconds inflated into a loomof excited cells within the tiny fly nervous system. Furthermore, when the fluorescent fly wasexposed to different odors, different areas of its brain lit up. The scent of almonds activated adifferent electrical grid than the scent of a ripe banana. Axel had found the functional map ofsmell.

But this imaging of insects, for all of its technical splendor, leaves the real mystery of scentunanswered. Using his neon neurons, Axel can look at the fly's brain and, with shockingaccuracy, discern what smell the fly is smelling. He performs this act of mind reading bylooking at the fly brain from the outside. But how does the fly know what it's experiencing?Unless you believe in a little drosophila ghost inside the fly machine, reconstructing itsdeconstructed smell, this mystery seems impossible to explain. As Axel notes, "No matterhow high we get in the fly brain when we map this sensory circuit, the question remains: whoin the fly brain is looking down? Who reads the olfactory map? This is our profound andbasic problem." ~ Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Also see Peter Russell speaking on the mystery of consciousness, on the Favorite Video Clips page.

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The Conquest of Illusion: Is What We See Real? by JJ van der Leeuw (review)

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Transcript of The Conquest of Illusion: Is What We See Real? by JJ van der Leeuw (review)