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Archive for the ‘perception’ Category

Plane view

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on May 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »

plane view

When I turned fifty I celebrated with a flight in a hot air balloon.
Standing in that small basket, the intermittent roar and heat of a burner over my head, peering over the edge of the woven cane, entranced by the red earth of the Atlas mountains receding beneath my feet, was the strangest feeling.

Standing still as the world fell silently and effortlessly away below me.

That day changed my relationship with the planet.

Somehow, since then, I can be amazed by how still I can stand as the Earth spins and hurls through the seemingly almost empty solar system.

I remember that now as I squint out of the window of a plane to see only intense, bright, white light, which almost imperceptibly begins to sink away beneath me, revealing a blue sky above which deepens as it soars towards the heavens.
How do I feel so still, so whole, when below me is only white cloud which swirls, and thins, and disappears, revealing glimpses of the spinning Earth, and above me just the vast, deep, yet mostly empty sky?

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Looking better

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography, tagged on April 2, 2012| 2 Comments »

forest

When I looked across the forest from the path, the colours, the shapes of the trees, and the diversity of it all, caught my attention. Pointing my iPhone (only working camera I had with me!) at what I could see, I captured the scene. Mmmm…lovely colours.
Then when I got home, I viewed the photos on my Mac and what did I see first?
That bird of prey, soaring high above the forest.
Did I see it when I was actually there?
No, I didn’t.
But it’s the first thing I see now.
Reminds me to take my time, to see the wood (and the birds flying above it), for the trees.
It also reminds me that what we see is strongly determined by the context in which we do the seeing. We never see all there is to see at any particular time.

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A passion for living

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography, psychology, tagged on March 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »

To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations….[Emily Dickinson]

kaleidoscope

…..gazing through one of my kaleidoscopes – enjoying this present moment

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Thinking differently about photography

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the viewing room, perception, photography, video on November 4, 2011| 2 Comments »

Probably one of the best ever examples of how its the photographer not the equipment which makes a great photo. Stunning shots in this little video, and a great story too. Watch it and be inspired!

 

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Sensation

Posted in from the consulting room, health, life, perception, psychology on August 25, 2011| 2 Comments »

I got thinking about sensations the other day. Patients talk to me every day about their sensations – pain, dizziness, nausea, itch, numbness and so on. The medical concept of such sensations is “symptoms”. Interestingly, not a single one of these symptoms are objective. Nobody can know them, experience them or measure them apart from the person who has them. But what are they? According to psychologists, sensations are the effects of sensory stimuli, and perceptions are our awareness, or understanding of them.

So, are sensations in the mind?

Well, that’s not where we tend to situate them. We situate them in the body. Pain is usually described as being felt in particular parts of the body. Pain in the leg, an itchy arm, a numb patch on the back of the hand….and so on. That suggests sensations are in the body, not the mind. But what about phantom limb pain? A sensation which is specifically located in a part of the body which no longer exists?

Where do doctors look for a problem when someone describes a sensation? The part of the body the sensation “belongs to”. If someone has chest pain, doctors go looking at the chest and its contents for an explanation of the pain. If they can’t find any abnormalities there, then the focus shifts to the mind – “it’s not in his chest, it’s in his head”. In other words, in the absence of physical pathology in that part of the body, the explanation given is a disorder of the mind.

Do you find this an adequate understanding?

I don’t.

It seems to me that sensations are phenomena of the person, and shouldn’t be attributed to either the body or the mind. They should be situated in a person’s story, because it’s the narratives we tell ourselves and others which create not only a sense of self, but all of our sensations too. Sensations may have locality, but that doesn’t make them the markers of pathology. They can be the expressions of meaning.

If you’re not sure what I’m on about here, check out this post. And if you’d like to read more about the idea of meanings behind sensations, you could start with the excellent “Why do People Get Ill?” or “Meaning-full Disease“.

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change your perspective

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on August 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I think some of the best shots you’ll get come when you change your position, and, thereby, your perspective. Photos taken at eye level, looking straight ahead, standing upright are amongst the most boring one in my opinion.
Look at this flower taken by sitting on the ground and holding the camera right down on the ground in front of me….

backlit raindropped

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Morning dew…the becoming of a new day

Posted in from the dark room, life, perception, photography on July 30, 2011| 1 Comment »

dewdrops

I love these drops of water on stems, leaves and petals. They are like little lenses to see the world through, little prisms or jewels decorating the hedgerow.

dewed filaments

I’ve no idea what this is. It was lying in the middle of the path right in front of me. Like gossamer, a little tangle of filaments in a small bundle on the ground. I guess it’s the creation of a spider of some kind but I’ve never seen anything like it.

spider in web

See the dew drop, just to the top right? What I didn’t notice as I took the photograph was that the creator of this web wasn’t finished. See her right in the middle? It looks to me that the inner spiral is not yet complete.

I saw all of this on the walk to the station which I take every single work day. How different! How new! How becoming, not being……

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Close to the edge

Posted in perception, philosophy, science, Uncategorized on June 22, 2011| 1 Comment »

20110622-012637.jpg

Where are the edges?
If its true that becoming, rather than being, is the core phenomenon of life (and I think it is) then the attempt to divvy up reality into pieces is misguided.
I was interested, therefore, to come across a piece of research looking into the issue of water’s boundary between liquid and gas phases. It turns out it’s just about impossible to draw the boundary.

The researchers concluded that the change between air and water happens in the space of a single water molecule.
“You recover the bulk phase of water extremely quickly,” Benderskii said.
While the transition happens in the uppermost layer of water molecules, the molecules involved change constantly. Even when they rise to the top layer, molecules for the most part are wholly submerged, spending only a quarter of their time straddling air and water.
The study raises the question of how exactly to define the air-water boundary.

Where do I end and you begin?

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Bento’s Sketchbook

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, perception on June 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I always look forward to reading John Berger, ever since his classic four part documentary and book, entitled Ways of Seeing (see them all here)

I love his description of story where he looks up at the stars and sees story as the creation of the invisible lines which turn stars into constellations and how those constellations and their stories then influence the way we live (even at a simple level of navigation), and his other, related telling of how story joins up the steps we take to create a path, or a journey. Those ideas and descriptions have become such a part of how I see the world that, probably, I now realise, he didn’t exactly say either of those things, but the essence of his ideas has embedded itself in my psyche and the details now are more more personally mine.

His latest book is Bento’s Sketchbook (ISBN 978-1-84467-684-2) and I’ve had it on Amazon pre-order since I first became aware of it. It’s one of those books where you take it out of its cardboard packaging and immediately, I mean immediately, begin to read it. I took it everywhere with me, reading it on trains, in cafes, at work and in my house. I loved it. Completely loved it.

The book is based around the story that Spinoza, the philosopher carried around and drew in a sketchbook, but the actual book has never been found. John Berger decided, on receiving a blank sketchbook one day, to create the book Spinoza might have created. He does this by influencing the way he sees the world by bringing Spinoza’s writings to the front of his mind….in other words, he sort of puts himself into Spinoza’s shoes and sees the world from a Spinoza-Berger stance. (Oh, I’m not sure that really captures it!)

The book is about seeing. It’s about being aware, and really experiencing the present moment, and using drawing as a tool to enable that. This book completely inspires me to try to draw. I’ve had that thought many times, but can’t get the old school teacher’s judgement that I had “no artistic ability” out of my head. Time to banish that after all these years, I reckon. After all, what do you think? Don’t you think my photos show at least some artistic ability??

I normally include a few quotes from books I’ve loved but I’m not going to do that here. I don’t want to reduce it to quotes. This book is an experience and one which can’t be felt without seeing John Berger’s own sketches which heavily illustrate the words.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is an inspiration and a call to wake up……go on, become a hero, not a zombie! (my words, not his!)

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The uniqueness of now

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, perception, philosophy on May 10, 2011| 1 Comment »

When you listen to a favourite piece of music, do you have the same experience every time you listen? Have you ever had a wonderful meal in a restaurant, returned at a later date and had, maybe another wonderful meal……but were the two meals the same? Was the experience the same? If you look at a great painting, do you see exactly the same painting every time? I don’t mean is it the same object. I mean do you have the same perceptive, affective experience…….do you actually notice, regard, attend to the painting in an identical way, and does that produce an identical pattern of thoughts and feelings in you?

William James considers it this way in his Stream of Consciousness essay…

…and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility….

The reality is, we never have the exact same experience twice. So maybe you should slow down a little, become more aware, more mindful of this present moment. You’ll never have another chance to have this particular experience again.

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