Hiroyuki Tsubomi on how we see the world
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| Above: Illustration of brain capacity limitation experiment |
So, how is this capacity limitation related with brain activity?
We all use the right hemisphere when we see the left visual field, and the left hemisphere for the right. Interestingly, brain activity is saturated when the number of consciously reportable representations reaches maximum capacity. That is to say, if you can consciously report three objects, your brain activity is saturated when you are presented with three colours. If you can manage five objects, your brain activity increases until you see five colours.
In short, the way we see appears to be considerably different from taking a finely-detailed photograph with a sophisticated camera. The conscious visual capacity is severely limited as shown above. In actuality, a large part of the ample visual field seems to consist of objects of which we are unconscious.
Observations ~
by Hiroyuki Tsubomi & Masako Yasuki (painter)
Tsubomi:
Scientific research method is designed to find out principles that can be generally applied to humans. The more people you can apply the principle to, the more significant a finding is deemed. Therefore, when you conduct a laboratory experiment, you eliminate as many variables that can affect the result as possible. In my experiments, this means that examinees are shown simple colors and shapes, and noises are minimized. In this way, the conditions are readied for the scientist to identify the most robust and simplest principle.
Having worked under such rules for a long time, it is hard for me to imagine the possibility of 'seeing the same thing differently in the first place'. I tend to think you can explain it by saying, 'The same thing is actually seen in the same way, but only accepted differently.' Or, 'This person is actually seeing the same thing in the same way, but the ultimate manner of expressing what has been seen is different.'
Yasuki:
The reality in which we all live is constantly moving and changing, regardless of whether you are the subject or the object of the act of seeing. To illustrate, imagine an art classroom in which the model does not move at all and the art students surrounding the model are fixed to their respective spots. This is, of course, an artificial and thus unrealistic situation. Inevitably, the model moves and shakes slightly, and the students also shift their bodies and change positions a little to 'see' the model. The point for me here is that the brain will try to nullify all these slight movements, and make us ignore the fact that the process of perception actually takes place within these movements. The fruit in still life paintings are slowly deteriorating, and the model is one week older than last week, but these facts are in most cases ignored under the rules of the act of 'seeing'.
Tsubomi:
Change is an interesting subject in human vision. On the one hand, we are sensitive to change. Changes in facial expression or individual differences in handwriting are indeed very small in physical terms, but we acutely notice them and adroitly analyze them in our everyday lives. On the other hand, as Ms. Yasuki points out, we are insensitive to change as well; the model will physically change in many respects within the space of one week. Differences in hairstyle, clothes, and angle of light, for instance, all make for a totally different physical existence. However, you would not think of the model as a different person.
It can be said that we abstract the core of a person or thing from a range of slightly different variations. So a certain insensitivity is, in a sense, crucial to us. To take an apple as an example: it can look different when it is seen from the left and seen from the right, but you cannot live a normal life if you regard it as two different apples just because it looks different. But at the same time – and I suppose this is where Ms. Yasuki's concern lies – to believe in static identification too much might make us insensitive to the state of a reality that is constantly changing moment by moment.
Yasuki:
Students are asked to draw what they see in their sketchbooks while walking or riding a bus, before (or without) 'thinking'. At the end of the session, students' sketchbooks are filled with page after page of traces of what has been seen.
Looking at these sketchbooks, you will typically find a page where several scenes from different times reside alongside each other, just like in an old Japanese scroll painting. Elsewhere, one object is depicted as seen from one side and from the opposite side simultaneously. Or else, only the light (or the shadow) is abstracted and traced down on paper, after the student has apparently given up on trying to follow the shape of each and every thing. You also notice that things which were clearly visible or which intrigued the student more than other are large, and that the conventional one-point perspective is hardly found (i.e. the type of perspective which makes things in the foreground appear large and things in the background appear small). Even things that students quite probably drew while standing still look as if they are shaking in the wind, or leave an impression that they are eventually going to disappear. All this, I think, could be pointing to the fact that the students had forgotten the stable nature of the relationship they had with the solid outside world when they 'saw' things.
Tsubomi:
It is interesting to think about drawing while moving, and imagine a painting that contains several different times in one painting plane. Human vision processing is interesting too: our field of vision is only a final output resulting from many steps of visual information processing. During the process, one section is only coding movements, for example, while another segment is processing and sorting information about objects regardless of position. Yet another segment is processing information about position and location in terms of space regardless of the types of object. These various separate jobs are finally put out as integrated human vision.
What we recognize as seeing is supposedly only this final output. Through the drawing session, however, the students seem to have pulled out the unprocessed information from one step before this final output. I had the same feeling when I saw Ms. Yasuki's paintings. A very interesting viewpoint indeed.
A Perspective on Hiroyuki Tsubomi
by Masako Yasuki (painter)
Dr Tsubomi takes an empirical approach to the study of human visual consciousness, analyzing accumulated data to monitor brain activity. Throughout my discussion with him, I kept one key phrase in mind: 'the brain within the landscape'.
In everyday life we still tend to instinctively believe that the world is shaped exactly as seen or remembered by ourselves, and judge things as such. However, upon looking a the data from the research Dr Tsubomi has conducted, this instinctive belief begins to fall apart. For instance, recent research reveals that the human brain can consciously see no more than three objects at one time. So, in reality, we only see very little of what comes into our field of vision.
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Hiroyuki TSUBOMI "Limit of Visual Consciousness" projector・PC
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Outside of the field of science, Dr Tsubomi's research offers a voiceless warning to us that we should always cast doubt on the world we believe we are seeing, and continue to shake and break it.
Hiroyuki Tsubomi: abridged resumé
– PhD (Experimental Psychology), Kyoto University
– Research fellow, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science
– Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Oregon
– Assistant Professor, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo
– Publications include:
- Tsubomi, H., Ikeda, T., Hanakawa, T., Hirose, N., Fukuyama, H., & Osaka, N. (in press) ‘Dissociable neural activations of conscious visibility and attention.’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Tsubomi, H., Ikeda, T., Hanakawa, T., Hirose, N., Fukuyama, H., & Osaka, N. (2009), ‘Connectivity and signal intensity in the parieto-occipital cortex predicts top-down attentional effect in visual masking: an fMRI study based on individual differences.’ Neuroimage, 45, 586-596
