Ways of Seeing III: ‘Take Your Glasses Off and See’

One of the most counterintuitive concepts when it comes to optometry is that we don’t actually see with our eyes. This is the claim made by Jacob Liberman in his 1995 book, Take Your Glasses Off and See. Originally an optometrist with 20/ 200 vision, Liberman went against his training and taught himself to see with 20/ 20 vision (an impossibility according to most optometrists). His guiding principle: ‘We don’t see with our eyes!’

The most significant factor in natural vision improvement seems to be in the mind, not in the eyes… the way we think actually determines the way we see… something as simple as a shift in awareness is capable of instantaneously transforming our vision […] The old definition of vision kept us viewing the world through a hole rather than as a whole, but we are meant to see so much more. As Goethe said on his deathbed, “Open the second shutter, so that more light can come in.”

Liberman’s insights seem to be confirmed by recent developments in the science of perception. In his book, The Experience Machine, Andy Clark argues that ‘all human experience arises at the meeting point of informed predictions and sensory stimulations’ — to the extent that what we see is formed by the mind and corrected by the senses only if there is a discrepancy:

Human brains are prediction machines. They…