Dear friends,
This week I want to tell you about focused vision and peripheral vision.
I realized that most of the day I see through focused vision: I focus my attention on one portions of the field of view at a time.Maybe it's because most of the useful information I interact with is stored on 2D interfaces such as papers or screens.
My eyes are very capable at focusing on confined visual areas while excluding what happens in the background.
Through peripheral vision, on the other hand, I am more aware of the overview: details become blurry but I experience the scene as an organic whole; different parts of my body such as the instincts and the senses are more active and thoughts seem to go inwardly. Whatever was before the background now becomes the protagonist.
It seems that the eyes can influence the brain and vice versa, Could it be that in focused vision my brain influences my eyes and that in peripheral vision it is my eyes who guide the brain’s activity?
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Here is how you can train the peripheral view: stand up and look in front of you, then lift your arms at your sides and bring your attention to your hands; progressively move your hands backward until they reach the edges of your field of view. Eventually, after some training you can extend the peripheral vision quite remarkably.
Perception
Peripheral vision and focused vision made me think about the auto-stereograms, a graphic technique that stores three dimensional informations into apparently disordered 2D images. I remember staring into these mysterious abstract images in the early 90’s and diving for hours into the 3D scene that would emerge from them.
What I find fascinating is that the tridimensional stereogram isn't actually there, it’s our mind that generates it using the information stored on the bi-dimentional surface.
To me this represents an analogy of the holographic reality: as partial beings we tend to look at portions of reality (the auto-stereogram - focused vision) while missing the bigger picture (the surface - diffused vision) which is probably more similar to a super complex fluid, so complex that we can only sense it, trusting the instincts more than the analysis and looking for macro patterns that can help us understand better the meaning of the details.
