Scopaesthesia

 Scopaesthesia

The word itself is not used very often. It is a controversial idea that says it is possible to sense being stared at by another person or an animal.

If it is true, then it seems our eyes are emitting images like a three dimensional projector. I think Science is very close to agreeing with this idea to some degree. We already know that what we see is not what is there. I allowed that as a sentence, with a period, for a reason: explaining it has a way of explaining it away. I’ll say it again, and make it even simpler:

What we see is not there.

Now I will explain:

Something, possibly very much like what we see is there.

Yesterday, I was walking by the paint department and a man stopped me. “Excuse me,” he said, pointing to the lid of a paint can he was holding, where a green dot had been placed by a paint mixing associate, “What color is this?”

I looked at the color and said, “It is a medium, sort of hunter green.”

“Thank you,” he said, “I am color-blind and I want a good color to paint a wheel barrow and I thought that might be green.”

He bought the can of “oops-paint” and was going to go home and paint his wheel barrow this green color, but to him, it may as well have been blue.

I want to reconsider what he said. He told me that he thought it was green, even though he was color-blind.

Years ago, I had the identical experience when I was thumbing through photographs taken by my friend, Ben English. After I had looked at a complete book, filled with his work, he asked me, “Do you have a favorite?”

“I do,” I said, “I particularly liked the yellow flower.”

He tilted his head and said, “I did take a picture of a yellow flower, but it is in black-and-white in this book.”

He found the image and asked, “This one?”

“Yes,” I said, “I somehow remembered it as yellow.”

What I saw in Ben’s book and the color the man saw on the paint can, was not there; but something very much like what we saw was there. Remembering the available data, the mind assigned the colors, based on prior experience and expectations. I remembered yellow because most flowers with that particular shape tend to be yellow. The man at the hardware store remembered green because he usually discovers that a color with that specific reflective quality is often green to other people.

Memory runs vision through a series of queries in order to guess with higher degrees of accuracy. This is a survival instinct and it is very good to have. If you see someone walking into a crowd, on a hot day in July, with a long trench coat, which happens to be closed and bulky, your senses need to send alarms to your entire nervous system; something is not right.

That example seems very obvious, but some animals are better than humans when it comes to recognizing threats. Some dog owners will tell you that their dog dislikes certain people. In many cases, a very sensitive dog identifies rascals with a very high degree of accuracy. Some dogs are trained to find drugs and other dogs are trained to recognize dangerous scenarios. Some dogs can somehow sense their owner’s health concerns before their owner even realizes what is about to happen.

I don’t think it is even debatable; dogs are better with precognition.

Again, this is all about survival.

The strangeness of this phenomena is not really at odds with the classical brain. We just need to get our minds around the fact that we are always guessing about everything we sense and we just happen to be very good at filling in the details.

With that said, I want to reiterate that what we see is not there; but something very much like it is (In most cases).

In old cartoons, the shadow of a mouse, when close to a candle, is often large enough to frighten a cat ten times its size. For a moment, the cat believes the shadow and runs from what it perceives as a giant mouse. At second glance, there is not really a giant mouse, but the data had been corrupted by irregularities; like the perfect placement of the candle.

I must wrap this up for now. But I want to say that I am convinced this research will reveal something wild about our senses. I believe the power we suspect with scopaesthesia will one day be explained by the, more universal, sense of being thought of.