First: What is ‘seeing”?

What is reading, and how do we do it?

Presumably we read by eye, by seeing print? Well, yes and no!

How much of what we ‘see’ is constructed entirely from information gathered in by our eyes and how much is deduced or derived from ideas already floated within our mind? Well, it all depends!

Frank Smith again:

The eyes are given altogether too much credit for reading… The eyes do not see at all, in a strictly literal sense. The eyes look, they are devices for collecting information for the brain, largely under the direction of the brain, and it is the brain that determines what we see and how we see it. Our perceptual decisions are based only partly on information from the eyes, greatly augmented by knowledge we already possess (2004 p.72).

This figure illustrates a Dalmatian dog, walking away from the viewer and sniffing the ground

figure 4.1

Let us play about with this idea a little. Look at figure 4.1. Many people are unable to ‘see’ what it is. Can you? Stop reading for a moment and look at it. At the end of this paragraph you can find what the original image was before it was degraded. Once armed with this information most people are able to ‘make out’ the figure and ‘see’ the picture. Once they have ‘got it’ they cannot, then, fail to ‘see’ it. Indeed, once they ‘see’ it they ‘see’ greater detail than is actually in the image - they ‘improve’ it in their ‘mind’s eye’. What is it? It is a picture of a Dalmatian dog, walking away from the viewer and sniffing the ground. (Roth & Frisby 1986. p.82.)

What was this ‘seeing’ that you did? Did you do it with your eyes, or your mind? If it was with your eyes alone, how come you had to be told what it was, and only then ‘saw’ it? Perhaps you could not see it until you were told what it was, but once you had been told you were also unable to return to the ‘can’t see it’ state. How come your mental image, once you could ‘see’ it, was so much better than the actual image? The fact is, as Smith says, your eyes ‘only’ collect visual information; it is your mind which ‘sees’. Your mind constructs meaning from visual information. Your mind, in fact, controls what is seen. It instructs your eyes to fix on what it has decided is presently important, a decision it reviews moment by moment. Your eyes record everything at that point indiscriminately, in an unselective way. It is your mind which makes a decision as to what it is seeing; your mind which allocates meaning to the data collected for it by your eyes.