Oliver Sacks
I'd love to know what Oliver Sacks was really meaning when he wrote/said this. He was clever and had a great understanding of the mind, so he probably had something specific in mind.
I wonder if its a bit about the difference say between hearing - the physical act of sound waves meeting clever things in our ears which interpret and then transmit them to our brains - and listening which is paying attention and making sense of the things we hear. Perhaps we listen with our mind?
Maybe he thinks that seeing is not simply the physical act of visual stimulus upon clever things in our eyes being relayed to our brain; but rather it is is the effect those images have within the brain - the connections and understandings within our mind that let us make sense of shapes, lines, dots, colour and so on and call it something.
With art I imagine it is that our minds make associations, delve deeper, consider the shadows, respond to the layout and all of those things that happen so instantly when we view an artwork. All of that helps us to see differently.
I am pretty sure that it it our brain that does the seeing and understanding, not just our eyes.
I had a fascinating conversation recently with a woman who has synesthesia ... her mind "sees" words in colors ... as we talked, I asked her if she "hears" words in her mind when she reads, to which she said no ... so surely, though we both have eyes to see and ears to hear, what our minds do with the incoming signals from the random markings we call "words in print" can be quite different from one person to the next
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