Aspects of how our brains process vision and what it means for posture and agility in movement.
The topic I introduce regarding posture, balance and vision is often called the “Where vs What?” aspects of vision, since I couldn’t think of am image to represent this I thought I would instead feature an image of one of the most recent and refreshing accounts of this aspect of vision, a book by Rolfer Aline Newton, I hasten to add the book is not all about vision!
The Question of Where vs What? In Human Vision
This one is going to sound strange but your brain processes information from your eyes along two different paths in your visual cortex, they have come to be known as the ‘where and what pathways’. There have been a number of human activities where the way we use our eyes seemed to make a difference, for instance peripheral vision, whilst poor at colour perception and detail is very good at registering fast moving objects, martial artists have developed various techniques for using their eyes whilst dealing with multiple adversaries.
For me personally the first hint of this distinction of “Where vs What” came from reading about Krishnamurti’s advice that when we want peace and stillness we look out into the world without having an opinion about each object we see, this came to be called non-judgemental seeing, it appeared that we have a lot of opinions about objects and things, we have after all a long long ancestory of making tools, clothes, jewelry, weapons, coins and money, cut diamonds, and things we love, desire or fear, we have symbols that can represent love and hate, our human world is all about objects and symbols. Krishnamurti advised that if we want to quieten down the mind and find a few moments of stillness then we needed to treat objects as mere shapes and patches of colour in our visual field, his view was that people who complained of endless circling inner monologues of thoughts could find relative quiet simply by looking out at the world turning off the “what” part of their brain and for a while at least turning up the volume on the “where” part of their brain simply interpreting their visual world as splashes of colour, contrast and so on. Of course this is not a great idea if you are driving and relying on symbols to tell you about sharp bends and so on!.
Later on I heard about a Rolfer called Hubert Godard who had a number of ideas that really interested me as an Alexander Technique teacher and one aspect, perhaps the major aspect of his work is looking at how human beings organise themselves in the gravity field and three dimensional space we live in. And once again this question of “Where vs What” started to crop up. It seemed that there were a number of Rolfers working with Hubert who were also very interested in this; notables include Kevin Frank and Aline Newton.
The thing that comes out of this research work is that in order to move easily in your environment and balance well you will be relying more heavily on the “where pathway” in your visual cortex, what an object is and what it means to you is less important than where it is in relation to you and how it moves in your visual field when you move, through the ‘where pathway’ an object becomes more of a visual marker, a reference point that helps your movement system navigate the three dimensional space and gravity field that you inhabit.
A recent book by Aline Newton – Reimagining the Body is a great summary of many aspects of this area of interest, on page 72 she introduces the idea of the “where” and “what” cortical visual system.
One astounding and compelling argument relates to ‘blindsighted’ people, that is people who have functioning eyes but cannot see, however they can navigate objects and walk around obstacles perfectly. It appears that they have lost the “What” pathway in the visual system and yet they have a perfectly functioning “Where” pathway and furthermore this pathway does not deliver “pictures” that a sighted person experiences but it does somehow does deliver information about where things are to those parts of the brain that control movement and navigation in the world. This is mind-bending for sighted people who have never experienced the complete absence of the “What” pathway and so cannot imagine knowing where an object is and how to get around it without actually being able to see it as an image.
Aline goes onto the describe the “Where” system as fast and that current thinking is that it is evolutionarily older and is linked to the aspects of balance in the inner ear and is linked to peripheral vision, she mentions research from Schmitz that suggests negative moods are more likely to occur when we are using a narrower field of vision and so tuning more into the What? channel rather than the Where? channel, Aline goes on to suggest that trauma can lock us into a tight narrow visual field that does not automatically reset after the danger or threat has passed. Some researchers have even gone so far as to characterise some kinds of narrow view vision as “weapon focus” – the ways the eyes respond to such a threat, but even when trauma is not present the way we increasingly focus on small hand held screens could be not only compromising our balance and movement systems but also giving us a propensity to the kinds of emotional and physiological responses associated with a threat, is text neck only an ergonomic issue or is it triggering other responses that might not be as severe as a real threat but maybe include levels of agitation.
In conclusion it seems that the way we use vision is very important to our well being, whether we generally keep a wide ambient, if you like panoramic field of awareness without fixating on anything in particular but remaining aware and present we will generally enjoy improved balance, poise, ease of movement and mood, in contrast, tight narrow and fixated vision will tend to leave us losing true fluidic balance and therefore relying on stiffened and braced joints to hold ourselves up, it may affect our breathing, increase our propensity to circular, never ending monkey mind thoughts, worries and even makes us feel and act as if we are under threat when we are not.
References:
Body Security: The Movement Brain Asks “Where Am I?” – Kevin Frank
Reimagining the Body – Somatic practice, Embodiment and the Science Of Movement – Aline Newton – Handspring Publishing.
