The Polemics of Visual Thinking:

Eye and I:Creative Intelligence and Perceptual Optics 3

Optics has proved that vision, simply put, is just as constructed as language. Theories containing visual networks of thought have replaced concepts such as the belief that sensations and images are simply presented to the mind's eye. Instead, it is currently believed that we actively construct our reality from the multiple messages of perception.

The ". . .dynamics of perception are formed by the interplay of two modes. . .", the first of which yields a stable model of the world by shaping forms into enduring concepts, whereas the send mode consists of "jump-cuts of vision . ." where the pervceiver " . .monitors the staccato changes of light, movements, and events that give new meaning to his or her experience." (John-Steiner: p.108-109). It is this construction of reality that Agnes Arber characterized in The Mind and the Eye as " . . .the visual and conceptual interpretation of the percieved . . ." (Arber: p.125) - or what has been termed "the intelligent eye".

Obviously, a child does not need to learn optics to learn to see. It is an experiential process. But to learn to understand how we see, and therefore, what we see, on a much more fundamental level, will provide the individual with a richer sensory world. Visual thinking, and on a broader scale, the complex use of imagery, seems to me akin to a second language we heard frequently as children, which we became fluent in, but lost as we grew older. It is my belief that every human being is inherently capable of being verbally and visually bi-lingual, as it were; that it is possible to educate every generation of children to love to draw as a means of self-definition, as much as the words they learn to define themselves. This can be achieved through several means, least of which is organizing the imagery already used in teaching around solid concepts - not simply as ornamental ( Arnheim's pure shapes, for example). Secondly, art classes, and early lessons in optics could take place simultaneously with that of writing and reading. Third, these would be continued through high school and college, at the appropriate level, where students would be encouraged to be literate in both art and literary criticism, in the analysis of vision as well as speech, of their own not interchanable, but interdependant abilities with word and image. Below I have included a small list of books (each of which contains many pictures) that I would put on a required reading list for the visually literate individual.