Mystery

Since Descartes - the prevailing picture of how we see the world that surrounds us and ourselves within it was - that there is a "little us" sitting somewhere in our brain - "in charge" of everything. The line of reasoning went along the following lines:

Our senses turn external stimuli into electro-chemical signals that are combined (or reconstructed) in our brain to form a comprehensive picture of the world that surrounds us - like an ultimate "virtual reality" machine.
The "little us in charge" (the "real us" - a perceiving, thinking, feeling individual) "plays an ultimate virtual reality game" responding to the input and directing our actions.
Responses travel back to our muscles as electro-chemical signals (in an amazingly coordinated way)....

This simplistic and "mechanical" picture of "little us in charge" - sitting somewhere in the brain - is slowly but surely replaced by a picture of "little us in charge" sitting "everywhere" in the brain. (Well, this "little us in charge" must be somewhere. Since we can not find it at any single point within the brain - it must be the whole of the brain itself or the electromagnetic field generated by our brain activity...)

But even this picture of "little us in charge sitting everywhere in the brain" is recently challenged by numerous findings.

Kanwisher and Kathleen O'Craven did not even dream of tossing all current theories about "how we see things" and "why we see them the way we do" into a turmoil. But - that was precisely what they did. With their team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology they reported that they could tell, with 85 percent accuracy, whether a person is thinking of or actually seeing a face or a place, just by looking at how his or her brain lights up. However, regarding differences between imagined and actually seen images, they wrote that fMRI images “reveal a striking similarity between regions activated during imagery and those activated during perception” (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience). In other words, they were not able to detect differences in the brain activity between imagined and actually seen images.

I invite you to remember as much you can what you are seeing right now - close your eyes and try to imagine the same.

The difference is enormous and impossible to express. Even when you look without paying attention to anything in particular.

The absence of a difference is much more significant than it appears at first glance - for there is an enormous difference in our "subjective" experience of actually seen and imagined image. Many expected this enormity to be somehow reflected in the activity of our brain - but imagined and actually seen images turned out to be the same as far our brain is concerned.

A careful reading of their report combined with that of Kanwisher and Kathleen O'Craven reveals that what our brain sees are hints, sketches or as they are called in psychology - schemas. But we do see more than our brain sees and we witness this by simple closing and opening our eyes. Is the whole concept of the "little us in charge" - simply misleading? Do we really need to have a "little us in charge" separated from the rest of our body? Do we really need to have a mind/body division?

A closer look at hot topics in circles of scientists and philosophers reveals that thoughts of many are still in the firm grip of this mind/body division with a "little us in charge" (mind) well and truly alive. The enormous difference between open and closed eyes is "explained" as an illusion. (For example - our eyes dart in all possible directions "bringing in" to the "little us in charge" bits and pieces and creating an "illusion of the richness of the world that surrounds us". This line of thinking tries to eliminate a need for a comprehensive picture of the world that surrounds us within our brain and to maintain the picture of "little us in charge" - this time being served with an illusion. But - open your eyes without looking at anything in particular...)

Mental arena of sketchy images at work could be seen in the article "Movie Experiment Hints That Our Brains Work Alike" (National Geographic).

A weak point in theories that are "explaining" the richness of the world that surrounds us as an illusion is that they do not make a difference between noticing and seeing. Everything is put in a mental arena of sketchy images and there is no difference between imagined, recalled and actually seen - and the richness of the actually seen is "explained away" as illusion.

Many are still uncomfortable with an alternative - that there is no mind/body division and that there is no "little us in charge" to be found in the brain or in any other particular spot within our body. We (whatever this "we" means) are simply - "all of ourselves". We see more than our brain sees (sketches, shapes or schemas) for we also see what our eyes see. We do notice much less than we see - but we do see much more than we notice.

Even in vivid dreams there is a high activity of our eyes (REM) suggesting their "contribution" to the richness of our dream.

I would suggest an interesting experiment involving subjects with various degrees of vividness of imagined images. By measuring activities of their eyes we could (I suspect) establish a strong correlation.

This is not as puzzling as it might seem. This is the fact of our everyday life - directly experienced in our transient now - a unique and infinite universe full of unique phenomena infinitely rich in details and colours that could never reach our brain - except as sketches built of hints or edges in space and time. When the activity of certain regions in our brain is reduced (as in meditation) - this richness of our direct experience of the world that surrounds us is even more profound.

Direct experiences of our transient now - filled with infinity of unique phenomena are translated into sketches within our brain. This enables us to "see" similarities and differences between otherwise unique phenomena and build concepts upon concepts upon concepts... This also enables us to remember and compare sketches of our past with sketches of our present and develop our sense of space and time and to further evolve "our description of the world that surrounds us and ourselves within it".