The Importance of Vision

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“Out of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful” – Helen Keller

Our vision presentation group did a great job describing sight. To recap how our vision works -- visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment using light in the visible spectrum reflected by the objected the environment. While Helen Keller is quoted to have saying that the sense of sight must be the most wonderful of the senses, I personally believe it’s the most instrumental sense in our day-to-day life.

Sight allows humans and animals to move around freely, to be able to look for danger or resources, and allows us to read the faces and body languages of those in their community. Our sight lets us create spatial awareness, lets us digest lots of information very quickly through reading, and allows us humans to store massive amounts of content. Without sight we would have learned but a fraction about our universe. Without microscopes we may have never discovered atoms and without telescopes we may have never discovered the stars. Our understanding of physics may have been minimal and it’s likely we never would have progressed to the technological age we have today. From an evolutionary standpoint, eyesight is unquestionably one of the most rewarding evolutionary traits that that a species could develop.

In the vision presentation we did a few optical illusions. I love optical illusions because it shows how fallible our eyesight is. While our eyes are seeing everything as they actually are, the neurons and synapses in our brains are interpreting and altering the reality of our sight. Because our brains are constantly making connections with different experiences and memories, it can often time hardwire our brains to think in certain ways when facing new experiences. For example, the fish and the bowl illusion was probably caused by your brain associating fish with being in tanks (not for sure, but that’s what I think).

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