What Is Perception In Art

Perception is utterly inexplainable. Nosotros can precisely describe the biological structure of eyes and brains. We can measure the electrochemical impulses and electrical fields generated past neurons. Merely reason fails united states of america when we effort to explain how these physical processes cause all the brilliant colours, textures and objects that appear in visual perception. In fact, perception is so perplexing that nosotros can find ourselves pushed to the edge of rational thought – and beyond – when nosotros try to understand information technology.

My recent article in Art & Perception uses works of art to demonstrate that visual perception – and representations of the visual earth – involve listen-stretching paradoxes and logical problems. I of the best examples in the history of art is René Magritte's The Treachery of Images, which insists that we are not seeing what we see.

Magritte's La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1928-ix. University of Alabama

Works of art tin reveal the bewildering conceptual conundrums at the heart of obviously straightforward visual experiences of the world. Here are some examples.

The Orange Problem

The painting at the peak this article is called The Orange Problem, and the problem it poses is "where is orange?" Information technology is painted with intense, almost fluorescent, pigments that mainly reflect light waves in the 635 to 590 nanometre range of the visible spectrum. Just neither the paint nor the light it reflects are really orange. Surprisingly, the painting every bit a physical object is colourless – objects reflect only unlike amounts of calorie-free free energy. It is our nervous system that interprets these different amounts of energy as the colours we see.

One of the first to capeesh the implications of this was the pioneering neurobiologist Johannes Müller in the early 19th century. He discovered that all qualities of sensation such equally colour, flavour, smell or sound are the production of identical electrical impulses travelling through the nervous arrangement. Yet we withal take little thought how these impulses create our colour sensations, or indeed if we all experience the same sensations. (The recent controversy over "The Dress" suggests we don't).

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And then if orange belongs only to our nervous organization, then to which part exactly? Cut open up a brain, scan it with the best available devices, and yous will find no "orangish-ness" among the cells and impulses. Paradoxically, the orange of the painting is right in front of united states of america, merely is nowhere to be constitute.

Where are the objects nosotros see?

On the Edge. Gouache on Indian paper, 2019. thirty x 20 cm. Robert Pepperell, Author provided

You are probably unsure what On the Edge depicts. In the absence of an obvious pregnant you may discover yourself scrolling through options in your mind, searching for objects that "fit" the clues (is information technology a sea creature or some kind of cosmic storm?) If so, you are experiencing at a deadening pace what commonly occurs then speedily that you never notice it. Your visual organisation is working to match its input with your prior knowledge to arrive at the all-time approximate of what is being seen.

Even before this matching can occur, an enormous corporeality of processing has already been done by the visual system, in the retinae and in the cortex, to build up a perceptible image from "primitive" elements such equally edges, corners and contrasts of color and brightness.

The fact that the visual organisation has to do all this work before nosotros tin can recognise an object shows u.s. that the objects we perceive are non just "there" in the earth. They take to be meticulously created within our neurobiology in gild to exist for us. Just again, cut open a encephalon, probe its neurons, and y'all volition notice no sea creatures or cosmic storms, just electrochemical action. Objects, like colours, are tangibly real yet are also untraceable figments of the mind – a contradictory state of affairs.

We are the world we see

Drawing drawing. Pencil and gouache on newspaper, 2011. xl x 30 cm. Robert Pepperell, Author provided

In the picture Drawing drawing you see a hand holding a pencil casting a shadow on some paper. But that is not quite true. What you really see are lines and patches of dark and light. We might say that these lines and patches, which are present, conjure up things that are absent. Every bit with all depictions, the objects we see depicted are simultaneously there and not there – which, every bit Magritte pointed out, is contradictory. "Pictures are paradoxes" said the eminent vision scientist Richard Gregory.

This picture also refers to itself, and to the process of its ain making. The pencil pb with which I made the cartoon and the paper on which information technology is drawn are both existent lead and paper and representations of themselves.

All this might exist dismissed as mere artistic eccentricity were it not for the fact that information technology exposes a remarkable property of our perceptual faculties. For if we run into logical problems conceiving of how something might be nowadays and absent, or one thing and another simultaneously, we have no problem perceiving it. Perception seems to have contradiction in its stride.

And, in fact, nosotros must accept that all perception is cocky-referential. When yous or I look at the world nosotros never see it "in itself", reverse to appearances. What we actually experience is our ain perceptual reconstruction of the world. Merely equally the drawing shows my hand in the act of cartoon itself, and so perception shows us in the act of perceiving ourselves.

The mind and the world outside

The full sublimity of these bug takes some fourth dimension to sink in. Unless you are feeling slightly dizzy you are probably not thinking near them hard enough. Just if you are interested in how our minds work – and in the relationship between mind and globe – and so they cannot be avoided. Like information technology or non, perception and delineation throw upwards cognitive conundrums that push across the limits of conventional logic.

This is something that many artists have intuitively understood, which is why nosotros frequently discover expressions of paradox, contradiction and self-reference in the history of fine art. Combining such insights into the nature of perception and depiction with the rational investigative tools of scientific discipline may be helpful – fifty-fifty necessary – if we are to meet the giddying challenge of explaining how nosotros see, and how we see pictures of what nosotros run across.