Art and Imagination

This book contains of a description of how we see think and make artwhich depends on the fact that we do not the world directly from our eyes.We see a picture of the physical world that your brain makes in your headwhich I call the visual world. You are not aware of this fact because yourbrain makes you think you see the world directly from your eyes. This illusionis essential because you depend on your visual world to get around in thereal world that does not diminish the scale. Using light waves projected bythe lenses of your eyes onto the cells of your retinas your brain producesyour visual world in the form of a lens projected picture using lines shapessurfaces forms space and colors. You can tell your visual world is lensprojected picture by its diminishing scale. Ironically the existence of thisillusionary visual world proves the existence of the underlying real world.I use the term vision for the neural process that produces that producesyour visual world in contrast with the external physical process that projectslight waves onto your retinas which I call eyesight. Your brain's amazingability to make a visual world seems rooted in an underlying neural processmodeled after the linear geometry of eyesight. Your experience of the visualworld includes your visual self. Your presence in relation to the visual worldincludes the parts of yourself you can see and feel. You can tell they arelens projected by your hand growing smaller when you move it away. Yousee your visual world and experience your other senses in relation to yourvisual self. Your awareness of your visual world relative to your visual selfconstitute consciousness making vision a primary function of your brain. Itstands to reason that a visual center of being came into existence throughevolution some six hundred million years ago with the development ofeyes and eyesight. Eyes would have not been of use if this were not so.