SHELDRAKE AND TEN

IS YOUR SKULL BEYOND THE SKY?

The biologist Rupert Sheldrake asks this beautiful question: if everything you see is an image inside your head — the whole world reduced to a tiny theater or screen somewhere inside your brain — then is your skull beyond the sky?

It took an inordinately long time for natural philosophy to settle on an agreed mechanics of vision, largely perhaps because of the authority of those who had supported the extramission theory — Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen all thought that light was emitted by the eye; Artistotle’s more complex theory of transparent materials such as air being themselves sentient still had the key action taking place beyond the skull. It wasn’t until Kepler that competing intromission theories reached some kind of clarity: nothing is emitted from the eye; the lens focuses incoming light into a two-dimensional image on the retina, just as in a camera obscura; information is carried along the optic nerve to visual centres in the brain, which expands it into the enveloping perspectives we move within. And that became the scientific theory of vision, settled and incontrovertible.

And yet there’s something very counter-intuitive about it. We do not see directly, but sit in a tiny, illuminated cinema within the darkness of the skull, processing a tiny two-dimensional (and actually upside-down) electrical image deep inside our brains. It’s a claustrophic feeling to remember that, as you gaze up at the stars, your skull lies beyond the sky.

Rupert Sheldrake thinks the theory incomplete; that what you see is experienced directly, not at several removes as a reconstructed image; that one’s mind does in some way reach out to touch things where they are. In which case the mind is not contained within the skull, but is more like a field, extending beyond it: he calls it Extended Mind theory. One of the reasons extramission theory persisted so long is that, intuitively, that’s how it feels. But there’s also clear evidence to support the idea in the form of the sense of being stared at, a phenomenon that now has sufficient recognition to merit a scientific name: scopaesthesia, from the Greek roots for vision and touch. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence: experienced hunters know better than to stare directly at their prey, but rely on peripheral vision as much as possible; private detectives use the same trick when tailing someone through city streets. Children are more sensitive than adults in this regard, and the NEMO science museum in Amsterdam has for many years run a simple experiment with visiting groups of students, in which one sits at the front and one sits behind them, either staring at the back of the other’s head or looking away. The student in front has to say whether they are being looked at or not: results are statistically significant, consistently around 55% correct, even in this artificial situation. Scopaesthesia has obvious survival value; it’s a predator response, and should be more active in unpredictable natural and social settings. If it’s real, it proves our modern understanding of the mechanics of vision not wrong, but incomplete: there must be more going on.

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I heard music from the pagoda and people in the soi, so I picked up my camera as I left the house. A big ceremony was beginning, with hundreds of people gathering. The soi was busy and full of noise. People were cooking and setting up tables.

A kid in a football shirt was staring in through the side window of the temple, fascinated by the musicians warming up inside and the glistening robes of the priests. It was a beautiful cameo; I filmed him watching them for a minute…. I was standing directly behind him, but within a few seconds he became aware of me, though he didn’t know where I was. He didn’t hear me, that’s for sure: the soi was noisy, and anyway a sound would have located me. As it was, he turned his head first to the right, then to the left, and only then turned round and saw me. He didn’t know what he was looking for; he had felt my gaze, through the eye of the camera, on the back of his head.

The sound of quivering paradigms fills the air like temple gongs.