Heroes Not Zombies

When you look at these two photos, do you think, like I do, that the first one looks “soft” and the second one looks “spiky” or “sharp”?

I don’t mean in terms of photographic quality, I mean, in terms of sensations.

When I look at that feather, I think it looks soft. When I look at the burr, I think it looks prickly.

But isn’t that odd?

These are photos. I’m using my eyesight to perceive them, not much touch sensory organs. I cannot feel their softness or their sharpness. But that’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I look at them.

This is what we do all the time.

We are constantly bathed in information, some of which we detect with our sensory systems of vision, hearing, smell, taste or touch. We use our brains somehow to direct attention towards some of those inputs and away from others. So sometimes what we notice is a sound, and at other times, a colour, or a light.

But we are not unidirectional. We don’t process only one type of information at a time. We use all our ways of knowing and we put the results together to create a unified, whole perception. So I can look at this feather, and think “soft”, or at the burr and think “spiky”, even though my eyes cannot experience those qualities.

The one way of knowing cannot be reduced to another. There are always multiple ways of knowing. What we are really great at is synthesising those ways to gain a greater understanding of what we perceive than we could ever achieve by using only one way.

On a different level, this is what Iain McGilchrist has highlighted in the different ways our two cerebral hemispheres approach the world. Our two hemispheres allow us different ways of knowing. How much more fruitful, however, to synthesise their activity, and to use our whole brains?!