Frank Stella famously said “what you see is what you see.” He wanted to stay close to perception and not stray too far into literary or personal interpretations. My title, cribbed from an article in Science, refers not to the invasion of personal emotion, but about the recently experimentally observed influence of literal, tactile touch sensations on visual experience.
Stare at a waterfall long enough, and nearby stationary objects such as rocks and trees will seem to drift up. The optical illusion is called motion aftereffect, and it may trick more than just your eyes, according to a new study. When subjects watched a stationary stripe on a computer screen after a machine stroked their fingertips, the motion of the stroking created the illusion that the stripe was moving. The discovery demonstrates for the first time a two-way crosstalk between touch and vision, challenging long-held notions of how the brain organizes the senses.
I guess the neuroscience of what’s involved here may similar to the sight-sound synaesthesia we’ve discussed before (see comments discussions here and especially here). But this is the first I’ve heard of a tactile version of it. Has anybody out there had experiences along those lines? Other than seeing stars when you bump your head?
Steve:
I remember that. Perhaps somebody could run a little experiment: spin until dizzy and then touch a stationary object. Does it seem to be moving in some accordance with the after effects? I myself don’t know and I’m not about to find out.
Can’t remember the name of the author, but a recent book on Cubism drew some strong connections between the tactile and the visual. The premise was that cubism may have been, in part, an effort to account visually for the sense of sequence and embodiment in the act of touching. Actually I included the book in my holiday wish list, but at sixty bucks a pop, nobody bit.
Jay,
Let me know the name of that book if you remember it. One of the cognitive science books I was looking at recently claimed that feeling one’s way about a room is a better analogy than a camera for how visual perception actually works. In vision, we’re just less aware of the contribution of our minds in integrating input sensations to give us an understanding of where we are.
Steve:
It Googled right up to the surface. Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, by Pepe Karmel. I would urge you to purchase it post haste as it has gone up ten dollars from $60 to $70 since I last noticed, and who knows where it will cap out. Not likely to be acquired by your local library in these straitened times.
Steve,
Kimon Nicolaides, who wrote the very famous “The Natural Way to Draw” (1941) says, “Merely to see… is not enough. It is necessary to have a fresh, vivid, physical contact with the object you draw through as many of the senses as possible — and especially through the sense of touch.
“Our understainding of what we see is based to a large extent on touch….[about gestural drawing] To be able to see the gesture, you must be able to feel it in your own body…”
I can’t find the passage but I can’t forget his advice to draw as if you were feeling your way down an arm, for example, with its curvatures. When I am doing figure drawing I am always aware of a sense of touch — with its concommitant bit of embarrassment, since we don’t normally touch strangers. But the drawing, when it is going well, feels as if I am.
“The Natural Way to Draw” is only about figure drawing and has an incredibly rigorous routine and set of rules which I never could bring myself to follow, but I liked reading his theory.