AAYAndWhatTheScientistSaid
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Went to ask Dr Beau Lotto of the Institute of Ophthalmology what he thought of AAY as an experiment. Crashed all sorts of discourses in the process (I work there, not as a researcher/science type but as somebody's PA) but he was very nice and helpful.
We talked about individual history of seeing things a particular way, and also our evolution as a species (or sub-group or culture within the species) into particular habits of perception.
In the context of optical illusions - which he calls 'bi-stable percepts' we discussed what it means to have experiences. He emphasised that the world as we see it isn't just 'out there' to be passively grasped, but is actively affected by our habits of perception. That is, we see things the way we do because we're used to seeing them that way. Without a history of associating particular meanings to particular perceptions, the perceptions are useless. That is to say, we learn to filter for some things and not others, in terms of (he says) how useful they are.
Interestingly, he said it's not what works best that determines evolution of perception-habits, but what doesn't work. (Could we postulate that if the white noise of hyperreal gets intolerable we'll evolve a perceptual immunity to it?).
Dr Lotto's field of research is WhyWeSeeWhatWeDo - so if someone looks at a bi-stable percept (an optical illusion) is there a way to ensure that they always see it as (let's say) an old woman, not a young one, as one of the famous illusions goes? (see BarnabySnap faculty for links to an illusion website).
This, he says, is much more about attention than it is about vision as such. He told me a story of watching his baby crying as it stared at a dangling mobile overhead. He said that it seemed as though the baby was trying to tear its attention from the visual stimulus and crying because it couldn't. Later, of course, the child gets older and learns to direct its attention this way or that.
With this degree of (let's say) learned attentive autonomy we have some limited control over what we see, although this is above a vast sea of invisible, learned, internalised and erased habits of perception - or, if you prefer, visual ideology. Within the field of perceptions that you can control, you can choose to direct your attention towards or away from tube-verts, but it's considerably harder to stop seeing them AS verts, or AS paper on a wall in a Tube station. It takes something drastic to jolt you out of your subconscious perceptual habits. We didn't really discuss what happens or might happen the other side of such a jolt, within the realm of the deep Other, as it were. The notion that something unknowable lies on the other side of our learned perceptual habits does, however, recall the Lacanian idea that the Real must always be mediated, as the shock of encountering it directly would cause psychosis .
But primarily the conversation focused on attention and awareness. I asked about what fields you might be working within if trying to train your attention in a particular direction; I am curious about the role of won't-power in attention. This compares to the experience of giving up smoking (see AdvertsAndSmoking) - the idea that you need sly lateral strategies for training something that's not immediately susceptible to rational input from the reasoning part of ourselves (ego? superego? my Freud's a bit rusty) that we are told is in control. When you start off it's a major conscious effort but what you're trying to do is shift it from conscious effort to unconscious habit, so that eventually the idea is you've completely forgetten that you ever had the habit. This applied (in my experience) to smoking, and - he agreed - might work for the attention devoted to adverts.
An NLP-practitioner friend of mine has a motto 'The unconscious doesn't hear negatives'. If you say 'I will not smoke' or 'I will not look at adverts', it just hears 'I will smoke' or 'I will look at adverts' and you end up thinking constantly about what you're trying to avoid. So the trick is to tell yourself not 'I will not smoke/look at adverts' but 'Every time I get the urge to do this I'll go for a walk/smile at the person sitting opposite/look at my hands' or some such thing. Nature abhors a vacuum, and you've got to look somewhere.
Interestingly, the effort of looking up from the verts and at the people, forcing your consciousness to bring them into focus instead of the image-world, is strongly reminiscent of shifting between foci in an optical illusion.
Perhaps the next stage of AAY is truly in the realm of Zen, and would entail holding your attention nowhere whilst on a crowded Tube carriage. But as a practical coping strategy training the attention not to filter the adverts out but to filter everything else in.
