9. Visual Memory and Imagination

In an earlier chapter we pointed out the fact that the functioning visual memory of the eye in many respects resembles that of a camera. A picture is snapped on a film, we said, but we do not see it until the film has been developed. A picture is flashed on the retina of the eye but we do not see it as a picture until the mind interprets it.

MEMORY

How does the mind interpret the picture? Through memory and imagination. You look across the room and "see" a chair. You know it is a chair because your memory recalls such objects as chairs. The baby, how­ever, does not see that chair because he has no memory of the concept of a chair. It is only after experience has taught him it is a chair that memory serves in the future to furnish him with that interpretation.

Visual memory, therefore, plays a preponderant part in "seeing," because it provides a prompt identification of the object. The more familiar the object, the better the memory and the less the degree of strain.

Everyone has had the experience of visiting a museum and coming away exhausted. We hear a woman exclaim, "I'm simply worn out from shop­ping." Why? Not because a prodigious effort was ex­pended in visiting the museum or in shopping, but because the eye was constantly looking at new objects, and it is an established fact that when we see new objects, where memory is constantly interpreting, the eyes and mind become tired and strain results so that errors of refraction are produced.

Here too our old enemy, the stare, enters the pic­ture. In the museum we encounter a painting, a tapestry, a statue, and we endeavor to see all of it at once, with the result that the eye stops shifting, the muscles become tense and vision blurs. If, on viewing the new object, we take in a small area at a time, in­stead of the set stare as though we were trying to swallow the whole meal at one time instead of in small bites, there is less fatigue.

And here once more mental control and relaxation enter the picture. For only when we are relaxed do we have mental control and only when we have mental control can we remember perfectly. When the memory of an object is perfect the vision is perfect.

The degree of memory which you have is a measure­ment of the degree of mental control and relaxation you have achieved. The absent-minded professor, on the contrary, is the favorite example of concentration, or thinking of one thing only, which makes mental con­trol and relaxation impossible.

A striking example of how accurate memory pro­duces perfect sight is the case of a professional knife-thrower, who earned his livelihood by throwing knives around the body of the circus lady. His aim never missed; yet, when examined for induction into the Army, the knife-thrower failed to pass his vision test! In the one act of knife-throwing—a neuromuscular process controlled by the brain and perfectly remembered—the man's vision was perfect.

The seamstress who threads the finest needle with ease and yet cannot see to read is another example of a person whose sight is normal in respect to a single visual act that is perfectly remembered and therefore perfectly seen. In other words, vision does not depend solely on the image focused upon the retina, but on the mind's interpretation of the image.

I have observed over and over that the people who come to me suffering from defective vision and eye-strain almost invariably suffer from poor memories. This is most noticeable in the case of school children whose work nearly always falls below normal when they have trouble with their eyes.

Countless experiments have revealed that the child, like the adult, strains to see a new object. The boy or girl, for instance, who can read with normal vision a familiar word on the blackboard, will strain to see an unfamiliar word, even though it is written in much bigger letters. This strain may be greatly increased if the child develops a fear of his teacher, of his inability to learn, of being scolded or appearing inadequate. No one is as vulnerable to ridicule as a child. If he is nervous or shy or temporarily below par physically, the experience of being laughed at for a mistake can leave scars on his self-esteem that sometimes last for years.

If his mind is slow, or if he thinks it is slow, to grasp the new word or the new object, he stares at it in an unconscious effort to force himself to grasp it. Small wonder that so many of the eye defects now prevalent develop in school children.

It is staggering to observe how their work improves when the eyestrain is corrected, and how their mental development is accelerated. This is not simply because they see better but because they are released from an emotional block which prevented them from learning better. It is the rested mind that learns and retains what it learns. All of us know the student who stays up all night before an examination, feverishly going over the material, and then fails the test because he was so tired he forgot the answers to questions which he actually knew.

Why does this eyestrain develop in viewing un­familiar objects? Because a mental strain occurs in identifying them. That is why memory becomes one of our greatest aids in improving defective vision; and the visual memory of an object is sharply remembered only if we look at it with attention. The less attention, the more imperfect the memory.

I only saw him once but I have never forgotten how he looked. ... I just saw it for a moment as we were passing through but I can see it now. . . ." All of us have had this experience of the face, or the object, or the scene which we observed at a moment when our interest was so caught and our attention so heightened that the thing seen was etched on the memory.

This helps us to understand why no two people can see quite the same thing. For each person the object seen varies in accordance with his mental inter­pretation of it, and this depends on his own memory of the object. Our interpretations, indeed, are as indi­vidual as our fingerprints and our personalities.

Ask five artists to paint the same landscape and you will get five landscapes; there will be similarities but there will be great differences, for each man saw not only through his eyes but through his visual memory and his imagination, his experience and his personality. Van Gogh and Turner and Rembrandt would each produce a highly individualistic picture because each man would see a different picture.

Honore Daumier carried around in his mind all day the people and the incidents he saw and at night, so vivid was his memory, he unrolled the mental film and drew his pictures.

Valuable as memory is as an aid to seeing, it can­not be forced. Everyone has experienced the exaspera­tion that comes with trying to force himself to re­member a name. "It is as familiar to me as my own," he exclaims impatiently. "It is on the tip of my tonguel"

By trying to force memory you are creating a... [Chapter Incomplete]

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