When Pascual-Leone blindfolded his volunteers, he was in a sense reinventing the process of perception. The brains of his volunteers still wanted to see, but they couldn’t do it with their eyes. He was changing their medium, but they were still artists. When the brushes are gone or can’t do the trick, an artist finds a new way to apply paint. Jackson Pollock dripped it from cans. Gerhard Richter crafted a squeegee to scrape across canvas. When Pascual-Leone usurped his volunteers’ sense of sight, they found a new way to see.
The amazing adaptability of vision that Pascual-Leone discovered through his volunteers’ experience is an example of neuroplasticity, and it’s a trick for which the visual cortex has gotten quite famous in the brain-science world. But there are more reasons to appreciate our sense of sight than its chameleon nature. Consider its strength. If we found ourselves in a place that was really dark and clear, without haze in the air, we could see a candle flickering thirty miles away with the naked eye. When we look into the night sky, we can easily see the International Space Station 250 miles up, or all the way to Saturn—about a billion miles off—if we know where to look.
And our eyes are speedy. They transfer data at the rate of about 8.75 megabits per second. That’s about three times the speed of the average Internet connection in the United States. We can recognize what’s in front of us faster than the speed of sound. And, though the taste of salt is starkly different from that of sugar, it takes our brain twice as long to register the difference in flavor than to distinguish the face of someone we like from that of someone we don’t. Indeed, scientists have discovered that it only takes 1⁄76 of a second to know we’re looking at the face of a friend, the car of our dreams, or the roses in our wedding bouquet.
What we see with our eyes feels real, accurate, and honest—so much so that it can be scary. In 1896, audiences saw moving images for the first time in history. French aficionados watched a short film called “L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” in a Paris cinema. The fifty-second black-and-white movie featured a train heading directly toward the viewer on its way into a coastal station. Though the audience sat in their seats and the film was a silent one, the image of the steam locomotive barreling closer was rumored to have led audience members to jump from their seats in terror.
We favor and intuitively trust our visual experiences, often over everything else. We believe that what we see is an accurate and complete representation of the world around us. But that’s not always the case. Take the example of the line drawing of an animal below. Give yourself about one second, but not more than that, to take a look. What is it? What’s your first impression?
Most people see the head of a horse or donkey. That’s what I see too. But look again, now for perhaps a bit longer. With this second glance, or from a changed perspective, you might see something quite different. A seal, perhaps? It’s possible that you saw the marine animal to begin with and then with my mention of the horse you looked back and tried to figure out if there was a typo in the text.
I have shown this image to hundreds of people, most recently to an auditorium in New York City’s Rubin Museum of Art full of patrons attending a lecture on the science and art of deception. I opened the conversation with this image, projected on a screen for one second. Then I polled the crowd, asking “Who saw the farm animal?” About 80 percent of arms shot up. At the same time, the remaining 20 percent started whispering, and the sound grew quickly to a din. I heard one older woman near the front, vintage eyeglasses pressed up hard against her eyes: “What is she talking about?!”
The group grew restless. The horse-seers turned in their seats, staring at the seal-seers, who swore there was no horse there. The seal-seers were audibly riled, certain that I, along with what must be the baited and staged audience, was pranking them. Everyone was certain that what they had seen was an artistic depiction, sure, but very obviously of whichever animal they themselves had seen first.
We have a blind faith in our visual experiences that we don’t hold for nearly any other source of information or inspiration. Though our reliance on and trust of our visual sense may occasionally lead us astray—as it did with my unsuspecting museum audience and with the Parisian audience unaccustomed to the sight of a train on the silver screen—visual perception is powerful.
All of this, combined, positions our eyes to be one of our greatest allies in the battle against ourselves as we work toward meeting our goals. Our eyes play a role in overcoming the mental hang-ups that plague our attempts to stay committed, the physical challenges that slow progress, and the constraints of reality that place a heavy burden on even getting started in the first place. When we tell ourselves we can’t do something, it might just be that we are seeing something as more challenging than it really is. When we say that what we’re up against is the impossible, it might not appear that way to someone else—and it doesn’t have to look that way to us. Just as the bespectacled woman in the front row of the museum auditorium eventually understood that the drawing could be of both a horse and a seal, any of us can teach ourselves to see the world differently if we understand how to take control of perception. Our eyes are incredible tools for shaping our experience. With them, we can quite literally see a new way forward.
Setting My Sights
In high school, I played saxophone in a band that covered punk, ska, and funk tunes. We spent loads of time together driving around with the stereo cranked, listening to bands that featured horn lines and whatever songs gave solos to the sax, trumpet, or trombone. Think Chicago meets whatever was hot in the late ’90s. When we heard on the radio that our favorite band from Los Angeles was coming to a nearby festival, we bought our tickets that day. Weeks later, when we realized that Goldfinger would be there without their horn section, what we’d spent on the tickets seemed like a tremendous waste. Goldfinger needed their saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, we adamantly thought. A show without that part of the group just wouldn’t sound the same—so much so that our trumpet player decided we should tell the band.
In our parentally subsidized rehearsal space, on beanbag chairs in the basement, we crafted the email message jointly. In it, we professed our utter disappointment in the half-act that the festival had booked, but also offered up our services. We knew the licks for “King for a Day.” We made our own for “Here in Your Bedroom.” Did they want us to play with them at the show?
Goldfinger’s lead singer, John Feldmann, emailed back. “Sure.”
Elated, we redoubled our commitment to the basement practice sessions, chose outfits that in hindsight are some of our most unfortunate decisions in this whole story, printed out the email from Feldmann, packed up our horns, and headed off to the show.
After some pleading with security to let us backstage—they were dubious that our dot-matrix-printed email, now smeared from sweaty palms holding it all day, was legitimate—we met up with Feldmann in his trailer. He had more tattoos on his arms than I had seen on all of my friends combined to date. And as monumental a moment in my life as that was, the conversation was equally banal. He asked us about school. How old we were. How long we’d been playing music. He offered us only water, even though we’d seen enough of VH1’s Behind the Music to be disappointed in this form of hospitality. We practiced a few licks with him strumming his unplugged guitar. Then it was go-time, and that genteel disposition was replaced with something else entirely. Every other word was something I can’t bring myself to put into print. But before the Frankenstein-like transition happened, Feldmann offered the three of us advice: “If you don’t have something to play, sing—because we can’t.” Then we all took to the stage.