The Varieties of Vision

Seeing Sound, Hearing Light 

In August 2008, researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and his colleagues trained monkeys to locate a light flashed on a screen.2 When the light was very bright, they found it easily, but when it was dim, it took quite a long time. But if the dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it quickly—more quickly than can be explained by old neurological thinking. The researchers recorded activity in neurons responsible for the earliest stages of activation. When the sound accompanied the dim light, the neurons were activated as if the light had been strong, at a speed that could only be explained by a direct connection between the lower auditory and visual centers in the brain.

This study is the first evidence that a sensory cell can process an alternative sensation, said coresearcher Pascal Barone of the Faculté de Médecine de Rangueil in Toulouse, France. This discovery may explain the very fast reactions of many animals, including humans, when multiple senses are stimulated simultaneously—whether from a rustling predator in the bush or a honking, speeding auto.

This phenomenon is not believed to be related to synesthesia, in which multiple senses seem to overlap, as when people hear colors or taste sounds. In synesthesia, multiple sensations are believed to combine at later stages of brain processing, not in lower, primary centers as in the above research.

Barone believes this research may help explain why some blind people who do not use the visual system to see have a highly developed sense of hearing and why deaf people often possess superior sight.3

Blindsight 

Blindsight is a condition that has been investigated extensively by neuroscientists in recent years. In blindsight, individuals have no awareness whatsoever of any visual perception. However, if pressed to guess at the location or movement of a visual stimulus, they can do so with an accuracy at levels significantly above chance. This is evidence that they are “seeing without seeing.” Blindsight most often occurs following injury to the normal visual pathways in the brain following trauma, stroke, or some other medical condition.

Blindsight provides some of the strongest evidence for the existence of an “unconscious.” Some experts suggest that blindsight may also exist in people with intact brain function. It might come into play when we need to act quickly, without consciously analyzing our need to do so. If so, it would be a fascinating function because, being entirely unconscious, when we employ it we would be completely unaware we are doing so. Unlike all the other senses, it would not leave a hint of awareness when it kicked it, vanishing without a trace like tracks in a windy desert.4, 5

First Sight 

Throughout human history, certain individuals have claimed the ability to “see” things at a distance in space and time. These purported abilities are called telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. In the 1920s, legendary researcher Joseph Banks Rhine coined the term ESP to collectively refer to these abilities, which have long been called “second sight,” implying that they are of a kind of backup to normal vision and are of secondary importance.

In recent columns, I've discussed the views of psychologist and consciousness researcher James C. Carpenter of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, who believes the term second sight is misleading. I'll briefly summarize.

In two seminal papers published in 2004, Carpenter proposed calling the human ability for distant and future knowing “first sight”—a fundamental, innate ability that everyone has and that transcends our visual sense.6(pp217-254),7(pp63-112)

First sight can be conveniently thought of as psychic antennae or mental radar that sweep our world in both space and time, acquiring information that we use every moment of our existence. First sight permits us always to exist “a little beyond ourselves in space and ahead of ourselves in time,” as Carpenter puts it. First sight is not limited to short distances and brief durations; if the need arises we can significantly expand the reach of our knowing.7(p90)

When you think about it, first sight resembles our other senses. You can't taste tasting, hear hearing, feel feeling, or see seeing. You just taste, hear, feel, and see without forethought or analysis. Once these senses kick in, we don't intellectualize about them by thinking, “I am touching something now.” We aren't fully aware of them, even while they are operating. At this moment I am touching the keys on my computer keyboard while writing this sentence, and although my touching the keys gives me neural feedback, it is so subtle I don't pause to register it consciously. In the same way, we usually don't think about first-sight abilities as they happen. They just occur, as a knowing that is outside of full awareness. But there is, of course, a fundamental difference between first sight and our physical senses. Our physical senses are body bound; first sight is not.

Mindsight 

Psychologist Kenneth Ring of the University of Connecticut and Evelyn E. Valarino, his research colleague, believe that even blind people possess first sight. Ring and Valarino8 report that congenitally blind individuals who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) or out-of-body experiences sometimes give detailed reports, later confirmed, suggesting that they have remotely “seen” a particular person, event, or scene during the NDE or out-of-body experience. But if they have been blind since birth, how is this possible? Ring believes the congenitally blind who see things at a distance during NDEs do so because they have entered a distinctive state of transcendental awareness he calls mindsight.8

This realm of transcendental awareness is barred to us during the normal waking state, Ring says. But as one nears death, conscious awareness is paradoxically expanded, according to typical reports of NDEers who have been there. In this state, says Ring, mindsight kicks in, making possible the acquisition of distant and future information, unrestrained by space and time.

Ring and Valarino's work contradicts those who claim that remote knowing involves some subtle, highly sensitive exercise of normal vision. To emphasize, not only do Ring and Valarino's congenitally blind subjects not have normal visual pathways and have never had them, but in many instances there is no visual stimulus, because the things that are seen are out of sight for even normal individuals. In spite of this, conscious perception takes place anyway.

Carpenter takes things further. He believes that first sight, Ring and Valarino's mindsight, operates continually—24-7, no letup—and not just during NDEs, but normally. Moreover, it functions so efficiently and subliminally that we are seldom aware of it.

Seeing What We Can See 

If first sight is fundamental, why is it not as obvious to us moderns as it is to tribal peoples? Perhaps it is not surprising that first sight goes undetected. Human functions—and dysfunctions—sometimes exist unnoticed, right under our noses. An example is congenital color blindness.

English chemist John Dalton first described this condition in 1798 after recognizing his own colorblindness four years earlier. He discovered that he confused scarlet with green and pink with blue, in common with his brother—a tipoff that this was an inherited condition. Dalton supposed that the vitreous humor, the liquid inside his eye, was colored blue, causing him to selectively absorb longer wavelengths. He left instructions for his eyes to be examined after his death, but the vitreous humor proved perfectly clear. Years later, DNA extracted from his preserved eye revealed that he had a deficiency in certain photo pigments in the retina.9 After he published his famous paper “Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colors,”10 people woke up to the existence of a malady that occurs worldwide, including around 7% of males and 0.4% of females in the United States.

Why was the circulation of the blood throughout the body undetected by anatomists until William Harvey described it in 1628? Why was the rotation of the earth around the sun concealed for most of human history? History is studded with “invisibles” that escaped notice, which, following their discovery, seemed obvious. These instances remind us of the folk saying, “If you want to hide the treasure, put it in plain sight.”

We see what we can see, and what we can see is determined largely by our beliefs. According to Lawrence Blair in Rhythms of Vision: The Changing Pattern of Belief, the natives of Patagonia could not see Magellan's ships when the ships arrived at the tip of South America in 1520.11 To the aborigines, the shore party appeared out of thin air on the beach. The shamans eventually discerned a faint image of the tall ships anchored offshore. After they pointed out the images and everyone concentrated on the concept of giant sailing ships for a while, the galleons materialized. Michael Polanyi12 reports a similar incident when Darwin's ship, Beagle, anchored off Patagonia in 1831. The natives could see the tiny rowboats but could not detect the mother ship. Their belief system had a place for small craft but not for large vessels.

All of us, including scientists, have blinders built into our worldview. As astronomer and author David Darling puts it, “If science searches the universe—as it does—for certain kinds of truth, then these are inevitably the only ones it will find. Everything else will slip through the net.”13(p158) Blindsight, first sight, and mindsight may be cases in point.

When we use these faculties, we don't reason, we simply act. People who a skilled in exercising these abilities are often described as being lucky or having excellent reflexes or good intuition.

A combat pilot knows when to veer right or left to escape antiaircraft fire before it arrives. A martial-arts adept knows his opponent's moves before they happen. Great battlefield commanders know the enemy's moves ahead of time. A gifted running back sees holes open up in the defense before they occur. A skilled researcher “just knows” the right path to follow to produce results. As Paul Drayson, Britain's minister of science, whose background is in robotics and biotechnology, says, “In my life there have been some things that I've known and I don't know why…like a sixth sense.”14 These actions often take place without the interference of the rational mind, on the spur of the moment, for reasons that are obscure to the individual experiencing them.

First sight is not always correct. Sometimes it is embarrassingly wrong and misleading. This isn't surprising. No human faculty is perfect, including those autonomic processes that normally operate beyond our awareness. Our heart skips beats even when it is not stressed; our blood pressure gets out of whack, even without an external stimulus; our bowel can become sluggish or overactive, even without obvious provocation. But it's the overall pattern of activity—how a function serves us in the long run—that matters most, not whether a system functions perfectly all the time.

If I sail a boat from San Francisco to Honolulu, I will be off course nearly all the time, because it is impossible to steer my craft perfectly without deviation. I'll arrive at my destination not through perfect steering but by constant course corrections. These variations of seeing are like that. They don't need to provide us with a perfect picture of the world; a simple heads-up or gut feeling will often suffice, alerting us to pay closer attention than usual to what is happening. This may present itself as a general sense of foreboding, as a fragmentary image of a future event, as a symbolic or metaphorical picture, or in some instances a highly detailed vision.

Seeing In Traditional Cultures 

Most premodern cultures are at home with these variations of vision. Although anthropologists doing fieldwork encounter these phenomena routinely, they are often reluctant to acknowledge them because they conflict with the Western assumption that all valid information is gained through the physical senses. There are exceptions, however.

Douchan Gersi is an adventurer, explorer, and filmmaker who has spent most of his life in some of the most isolated regions on earth documenting those he calls “people of tradition.” In his captivating book Faces in the Smoke, he describes how premonitions, telepathy, and clairvoyance are employed in a natural, seamless way in everyday life in these cultures.15 (As a reminder, telepathy is mind-to-mind communication without sensory involvement. Clairvoyance is literally “clear seeing,” or the acquisition of information about a place, event, or object without sensory mediation. When clairvoyance involves a future event, it is called precognition, future knowing, or a premonition.)

One day, while driving across wasteland in the Sahara desert, Gersi encountered a single Tuareg nomad sitting by his camel. Judging from the tracks, Gersi deduced that he had been occupying the same spot for several days. The location seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, with no distinguishing features—just featureless sand, stone, and rocky hills. Intrigued, Gersi stopped and shared tea with the man.

The nomad explained that he was waiting for a friend. Seven months earlier, while in a town called Gao in Mali, 600 miles away, he had made a pact with his friend to meet at this particular place, at this specific time. Each of them was on a journey and would be converging on the spot from different directions.

Looking around, Gersi was dubious that anyone could pick this place out of the surrounding immensity. The possibility that two people could converge here, from opposite directions, defied his imagination.

“Can't miss the place,” the nomad said, while giving names to everything that surrounded them. The only problem was that the nomad's water was about to run out; if his friend did not arrive in the next three days, he would have to move on.

The next morning the Tuareg told Gersi that things were on schedule. He had communicated with his friend during the night and that he would arrive in two days.

“Did you dream about him?” Gersi asked.

“No, I didn't dream about him. He just told me where he was,” the nomad said. He explained that his friend had informed him that he had had to make a detour to fill his water bags.

“But how did he tell you?” Gersi asked.

“He told me that in my mind,” said the nomad. “And in the same way I answered him that I will be waiting for him.” Still skeptical, Gersi waited to see the outcome. Two days later, right on schedule, the Tuareg's friend arrived.15(pp84-86)

On another occasion, Gersi and his colleagues were facing a treacherous, 800-mile drive across the Sahara from Djanet, an Algerian city near the Libyan border, to Timbuktu, in Mali. The route involved large expanses of sand dunes and dangerous quicksand, mountains, rocky volcanic areas, and deep valleys. The available maps were not specific, and it would have been foolish to attempt the journey without a guide.

Gersi met the head of the military outpost in Djanet, who recommended a man named Iken as the best guide for the trip. Gersi should not be concerned, the commandant said, that Iken was blind.

Iken, in his 50s, had spent his childhood and adolescence with his father, who led caravans throughout the Sahara. He then became a caravanner himself and was eventually hired as a guide by the French Foreign Legion. Around age 30 he contracted trachoma, an eye infection, which eventually led to blindness.

“Have you made this trip before?” Gersi asked him.

“Not exactly…but I see very well what you want to do,” Iken replied. He explained that it was necessary for him to sit on the spare tire that was strapped to the hood of the Land Rover. “I need to breathe the smell of the desert,” he said, “…and hear the different noises the tires make on the ground; that tells me a lot about the terrain.” He could do neither of these things from inside the car, he said. He added, “Don't talk while driving, but look carefully at the landscape all around you…. That, too, helps me see where I am.”

It was as if blind Iken could absorb information about the surrounding landscape from others. If they knew what things looked like, so did he. Iken's guidance was all the more remarkable considering that Gersi's party often drove at night without headlights.

Iken turned out to be one big human sense organ that functioned on every level except the visual. He would often stop the vehicle, kneel, caress the sand, and contemplate its texture. He would breathe deeply and smell the desert for long periods. Once, when water ran short, he stroked the branches of a large dried bush, smelled all around, and indicated new directions. Several hours later the group found water. With Iken's help Gersi's group made it to Timbuktu without incident.15(pp86-91)

Gersi had similar experiences with Aborigines in the Australian desert and Bushmen in the Kalahari. He finds it difficult to pigeonhole their faculties into the Western categories of telepathy, clairvoyance, or premonition, and winds up using “intuition” to describe them. I favor the general term “nonlocal knowing”—acquiring information in ways that transcend the limitations of space and time—without agonizing over whether something is technically an example of telepathy, clairvoyance, or premonition.

Native tribes the world over take first sight for granted. Josiah Gregg (1806-1850) was an explorer, naturalist, and author who traded on the Santa Fe trail during the 1830s. On one occasion he watched a Comanche arc an arrow that killed a prairie dog out of sight behind a hillock, a trick Gregg could not duplicate with a rifle.16

When Victorio, the Apache leader, wished to know the location of the enemy, which often included the U.S. Cavalry, Lozen, his shaman and sister, would stand with outstretched arms, palms up, and pray. As she turned slowly to follow the sun's path, her hands would begin to tingle and the palms change color when she faced the foe. The intensity of the sensation indicated the approximate distance of the enemy.17

David Unaipon, a native Australian, described in the early 1900s how the use of smoke signals depended on a nonlocal function of consciousness. Westerners who witnessed this custom assumed that some sort of code was involved in the signaling. Not so, said Unaipon; the function of the smoke signal was simply to get everyone's attention so that distant, mind-to-mind communication might then take place.18(p34)

Forty years later, anthropologist Ronald Rose was told the same thing during his investigations of the psychical practices and beliefs of Australian Aborigines. “When we see smoke we think, and often we find clearness,” one native said. The smoke, Rose was informed, was of a different kind from that which rose from a campfire. Its function was to alert the receiver to assume the same mental channel. “I am thinking, too, so that he thinks my thoughts,” said the Aborigine.19

Are these unsubstantiated anecdotes that have been stretched beyond belief by gullible Westerners? Rose tested Lizzie, an Australian Aborigine over 70 years old, with the help of a pack of Zener cards, the sort that psi researchers use in laboratory experiments. Zener cards have one of five different symbols. Each pack has 25 cards, five of each design. Of 1,700 trials, Lizzie was able to correctly guess the correct card symbol 488 times, when only 340 would have been expected by chance, an astronomical result. When tested again years later when she was 79, she again scored millions to one against chance. Other Aborigines also scored significantly above chance.13(p277)

Bishop Henry Callaway, an Anglican priest, missionary, and medical doctor, lived among the Zulu of South Africa during the second half of the 19th century. Those Zulu youth who aspired to become diviners were tested for their skills of clairvoyance (“clear seeing”). They had to prove themselves capable of finding hidden objects, such as identifying under which of a number of pots a particular object was concealed.20

Anthropologist Stephan A. Schwartz, who writes the SchwartzReport column for Explore, describes in his book The Secret Vaults of Time a custom of the Montagnais, a tribe of the Algonquin people, who lived in eastern Canada. If they wished to get in contact with a person far away, even up to hundreds of miles, they would go into the forest and set up a log shelter the size of a telephone booth, get inside, and carry on a two-way conversation. If the contact failed, the distant person had died. Western observers of this custom reported that when this process was going on, the shelter would shake.21

“Shaking shelters” during native ceremonies were commonly reported by French Jesuit missionaries as soon as they arrived in Canada in the 17th century. The Jesuits were eager to prove that the phenomenon was due to fraud. The medicine man inside the shelter, they claimed, was manually shaking the teepee. Often, however, the lodge shook so violently that one individual could not possibly have done it, and sometimes the thick lodge poles were seen to bend from the top at such an angle that no man could accomplish it. Giving up on fraud, some Jesuits settled on the explanation that the devil made the teepees bend and shake.22

Gersi believes that we all have an ability for nonlocal knowing; after all, most of us describe such an event at some point in our life. But for most of us, this talent atrophies because, Gersi suggests, it is not crucial for our survival. These abilities may become even rarer in the future because we have a bewildering number of ways to gain information quickly. Why bother with communicating nonlocally when we can call anyone, anywhere, on a cell phone? Why intuit where we are when a GPS device can pinpoint our location, within a meter, anywhere on earth? But what happens when the batteries run down?

With premodern people, the situation is different. They cultivate nonlocal ways of knowing because, as with the Tuaregs, their lives depend on them. Urgency, survival, life and death—this is the context in which their nonlocal abilities are rooted.

Perhaps it is no accident that nonlocal knowing often surprises us in similar situations—in times of danger, a health crisis, or when a loved one is in trouble. During these life-and-death moments, our minds become concentrated. Like a Tuareg who must find water soon or die, our mind focuses without distraction, and nonlocal knowing makes an appearance.

A Vision Of The Future 

If you want to raise eyebrows at faculty meetings, just talk about the variations of vision that are a part of everyday life in traditional cultures and in the experiences of individuals such as Swedenborg and Goethe. I've often underestimated the disdain many scholars have for these matters. For some, this subject can be a matter of life and death. Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett of Tufts University, for example, has said that if ESP is real he will commit suicide.31 So perhaps it's best not to bring up these matters at the faculty club, at least until after a couple of cocktails.

No matter. Science is drifting slowly but inexorably toward a wider concept of vision. Not so long ago the neuroscience underlying the seeing of sound and the hearing of light would have been dismissed as the stuff of science fiction. Blindsight would have seemed equally weird, and mindsight would not have been given a hearing.

The Great Stumbling Block for skeptics is the assumption that seeing cannot violate the confinements of space, time, and the bodily senses. We now know that this assumption is simply wrong. Several experiments, now replicated in laboratories worldwide, have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is possible to acquire information nonlocally. One variety of these studies is the presentiment experiments of Radin, Bierman, and others, recently reviewed in this column.32(pp83-156,83-90) “In my opinion,” says psychologist and experimentalist Stanley Krippner of San Francisco's Saybrook Graduate School, “this is currently the most important experiment in psi research.”33

The tide of belief is already shifting. In one survey of more than 1,100 college professors in the United States, 55% of natural scientists, 66% of social scientists (psychologists excluded), and 77% of academics in the arts, humanities, and education reported believing that ESP is either an established fact or a likely possibility.34

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limit of the world,” Schopenhauer said.35 Today our field of vision has expanded to include the entire earth. Videophones, videoconferencing, and Skype have reshaped our view of what it means to link visually with someone. Remote seeing, mediated electronically, has become a daily reality for millions. The irony is that this basic phenomenon is ancient, as seers and visionaries have known throughout human history. Their ability to see remotely was innate and was not susceptible to battery failure.

The strangeness of remote vision is diminishing. Someday soon, somewhere, someone will discover to her surprise that a remote image popped into her head before she hit the “on” button of her videophone. She will have rediscovered what our ancestors did routinely. She'll get good at it. She'll tell a friend, and word will spread. And one day our descendants will speak of the era when we discarded the gadgets and simply tuned in.