More than meets the mind's eye

There is an old quip that “there is more going on than meets the eye,” which long ago seemed to me to only point out that one is not seeing all that is going on in the background of some events. Yet I now ponder the thought a bit more broadly.

“Meets the eye” could refer to more than just what scenes are being seen by the eyes. The visible light-waves that enter the eye’s lens to form an image on the retina, are what is meeting the eye, more specifically. Those light-waves flowing through into the eye and triggering chemical processes in the eye’s retina, and those chemical changes trigger electrical signals that head over to talk with lots of other signals from elsewhere in the retina and get compared by the brain and mind to have them trigger meaningful impressions.

However, there are lots of light waves that head towards the eye that are not detectable by the retina’s chemistry, and thus presumably do not end up as meaningfulness in the mind. For example, radio, WiFi and television waves flow into the eye yet are ignored by the eye. In fact, the vast majority of electromagnetic waves that “meet the eye” are not presented by the eye to the brain as being there. The waves “meet the eye” but do not meet the mind’s eye.

Of course, the phrase was more likely to refer to such things as the mischief that the bad boys are doing on the other side of the wall out of sight; or even the complex inner workings of a clock that all one sees is the time indication on the face of the clock.

The mind’s eye, the imagination, is usually tuned up to best-possible represent the real world out there. For example, as one drives down the road, one’s mental image of the road out there with all its implications, needs to be a close similarity with the real-physical-world out there so as to be adequately useful to help guide one’s driving of the car.
Yet, as in watching a video or reading an adventure novel, the mind’s eye can also “see” that which has little if any relationship with what is physically out there right now.

And, one can imagine doing something without actually doing it. For example, I can imagine typing “mind’s eye” here before actually typing it. By doing so I can evaluate the difficulty level involved as well as probable results of the imagined action. Athletes can improve their performance by repeatedly imagining themselves performing some physical action perfectly, before actually doing it physically, I have read.

Yet also much more is received by the eye than reaches conscious awareness. One can cope with only a small fraction of the million bits of visual data coming in from the eyes each second; thus some part of the brain (or mind) has to pre-filter out nearly all that is actually meeting the eye via light waves, before passing on the selected goodies being offered up for some attention by the conscious mind.

So where this trail of thought is leading me right now, might be something like that there is more being received by the eye than am aware of, that actually could be quite interesting or informative. Did “I” set up all the pre-filter parameters that controls what reaches my consciousness? What even if something out there meeting my eye is telling my pre-filters to not “see” certain things? Such a thing could be very useful to those who seek to deceive or manipulate people.

And I have the “feeling” that even right now close to me, there is more going on than meets my conscious eye, that would be important for me to know was going on.

More on the looking-for effect

This post is another that was stimulated into being, by the recently pointed out wisdom (on Serge King's facebook post) that "we do not see what we are looking at, we see what we are looking for."

(Reference my post http://www.kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2012/04/electroherbalism-and-we-see-what-we-are.html )

There is a recent scientific report that seems to me to directly address this problem, although not exactly in our context.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340003/title/Attention_tunes_the_minds_ear
The scientists were exploring "the cocktail party effect" where a person is able to hear one particular voice's chatter in a room full of chattering people.

They point out that it is our ability to pay attention to specific things, that is involved.

That is, it is what we are paying attention to, is what we tend to observe amongst the chaos of other stuff going on.

The brain tends to "lock onto" the signal of interest, and thereafter it is processed as if it were the only thing happening, thus enabling the perceiver to pick out the desired data among the chaos. However, if something internal distracts the listener and shifts its lock onto the wrong signal, and thus excluding all the other signals including the real one, an incorrect answer or data point will be found. This is part of the "we don't see what we look at…." part of the phenomenon, I think..

And so, in our current context, when there is all kinds of stuff going on, we tend to sort out that which we are looking for, which might actually be somewhere in all that semi-chaotic scenario.

And thus, it may say something more about the perceiver, than that which is thought to be being perceived.

Which suggests to me that to more correctly ascertain the validity of a given item of data, the nature of the perceiver along with the then-current focus of attention of the perceiver, needs to be attached as modifiers to the data.

Although doing this would not keep us from "seeing only what we are looking for" we at least would become aware of what kinds of things could be perceived, along with what kinds of things would have been ignored, in the perceived data.

Jim Cline