The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley (January 2019)
The conventional wisdom regarding vision explains our eyesight as a result of an entirely mechanical process. Aldous Huxley suggests there are more factors that influence our sight in The Art of Seeing, a short work that challenges many ubiquitous understandings about vision (1). Huxley's main idea is that vision works much like any other bodily process in that although we are limited in a certain way by our biology, we often fail to maximize our natural ability.
One method Huxley relies on to introduce his idea is one of my favorite advances devices - The Analogy. He compares a person with poor vision to someone with injured legs. If we allow an injured person to use crutches only for a limited initial period before turning the focus toward rehabilitation, why don’t we adopt a similar approach to vision problems? It’s a compelling thought but raises the question of what an eyesight rehabilitation program would entail (I’ll examine some of Huxley’s specific ideas that might comprise such a program in an upcoming post).
Huxley extends his initial analogy when he explains how we learn to see in the same way we learn many other motor skills – through trial and error. Over time, we refine our skill via a repeated process of mimicry and intuition. In this sense, we never learn to see ‘correctly’ but rather try our best to see a little better today than we did yesterday. Therefore, we are unable to recognize when we are seeing incorrectly and as a result bring unintended damage through a combination of poor habits and harmful practices. A person interested in making the most out of his or her vision must take an approach similar to how we build any skill – learn the proper methods, understand the general principles, and remember that past failures are no guarantee of continued poor results in the future.
The realization I had that really made this book memorable for me was how it explained a certain weird paradox about natural selection. My vision is very poor without corrective lenses but my prescription isn’t exactly uncommon. If my genes and those of so many other vision-impaired are the result of a long selection process favoring survival fitness, surely my functional blindness would have ruled my DNA out of the genetic pool many generations ago. I mean, if my ancestors could barely see each other, how did they manage to plant my family tree, right? In reflecting on The Art of Seeing, I wondered if to some extent our vision problems are the result of learned, repetitive, or modern behavior. This explanation at least provides a reasonable answer for the question of how so many people survived in the past despite having such a significant shortcoming.
One up: I liked the suggestion that daydreaming should be done with eyes closed. Huxley’s reasoning was that we should avoid using our eyes for anything except seeing (and sensing) lest we establish bad habits and dissociate the mind from the eye’s proper use. This is a perfectly sensible explanation. Of course, I must add that from experience daydreaming is also better when done with eyes closed and that this fact alone is sufficient reason for the recommendation.
One down: Huxley notes that vision testing is biased against nervous test takers and that making a patient comfortable should be a prerequisite before the doctor administers an eye exam. His suggestion is that instead of using the soulless Snellen chart (it’s the one with the huge E at the top) the test should incorporate more familiar sights to help ease the patient’s nerves.
Just saying: The general insight that a combination of relaxation and activity is often the best recipe for learning applies far more broadly than to improving vision. People learn skills when they practice without strain.
Footnotes / bad puns
1. What…?
Fine, I’ll say it – this was an eye-opening book.
Happy?
