Imagination-Archiv - Farbpsychologie

Constructing the meaning and significance of perception

Axel Buether — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:14:26 +0000

“To see and to be seen is to exist.” The state of research in the neurosciences proves that the world we see every day is a construction of our consciousness. We and the environment only exist to the extent that we are consciously and unconsciously aware of them. We also have the certainty that something exists outside our consciousness. To form our imagination, we need a permanent source of events whose explanation requires the existence of a world outside our consciousness. If nothing happens after birth or we do nothing actively, then we effectively remain blind, as our memory cannot form a vivid image of the reality of our own lives. We see a phenomenal world of color and light whose structures do not refer to other content because we have not been able to form associative links in the brain.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of people who look back on their lives after a brain injury. They often only realize that something fundamental has changed when they see the consequences of their actions. People, places or objects are suddenly missing from their world, as if they had never existed in it before. If the associative connections of our nerve networks in the brain are destroyed, we lose parts of our knowledge structure. Things can disappear completely, as can their usage properties, behavioral states or action potentials. This also changes our spatial-visual competence, allowing us to recognize the functional structures of our brain’s processing. The association network determines our reality.

To the extent that we lose access to the “vocabulary” or “image treasure” of our memory, we experience difficulties in understanding and communicating. This shows that the memory reference of our visual space forms a language system whose structures of meaning and action result from the communication process with the environment.

Publication “The formation of spatial-visual competence”

Der Beitrag Constructing the meaning and significance of perception erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.

Perception as self-education

Axel Buether — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:46:54 +0000

Our ideas about our own reality and identity are based on the capacity of our nervous system. Its genetically inherited basic structure creates the framework of knowledge and understanding that we shape ourselves through our actions. By describing our experiences, whether in verbal or descriptive form, we form an awareness of the way we exist in the environment. Our concepts of reality achieve a high degree of intersubjectivity when we constantly question and update them in dialog with the environment. The challenges of our everyday lives form the learning environment, the motivation and the corrective for the virtual space of possibilities in which our thinking takes place and on which we base our actions.

Words evoke predominantly vivid images in the memory of blind people, but these always seem unreal to them when they hinder their orientation in everyday life. On the other hand, words also offer no equivalent for the experience of people born blind who, after successful eye surgery, experience their world for the first time in color and full of light. Their amazement makes it clear that we often communicate through words without actually understanding each other.

This applies not only to the communication of blind and visually impaired people, but especially to that of experts and laypeople, such as children and adults or pupils and teachers. If we are aware of the structure of our own vivid world of imagination and perception and accept the subjectivity and limitations of all knowledge associated with this, new possibilities for understanding open up to us. As soon as we look at the world and no longer expect anything new in it or stop constantly questioning what we already know, we lack the necessary openness to update and develop our imagination. If we have no questions, we stop learning. Looking at the environment in this way is like a dialog in which we already know all the answers.

Publication “The formation of spatial-visual competence”

Der Beitrag Perception as self-education erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.