Seeing: Starting with Saccades

What does “seeing” mean? Seeing does not mean apprehending the world around you the way a movie camera takes in a scene. Seeing does not mean accurately recording what is in front of you. Instead, seeing means cobbling together an image, on the fly, from a series of small observations, which may or may not be true.

We see the world through saccades: rapid, ballistic movements of the eye between fixed points, which are small bits of information. They range between in amplitude from the very small (the movement of eyes across the page of a book) to the large (the pieces of reality view from scanning a landscape). Saccades usually take a few tens of milliseconds.

With saccades, our eyes dart around a scene and grab tiny bits of the visual world. That’s when “seeing” begins.

At any given moment, we combine these tiny fragments into a picture. We fill the gaps between these tiny fragments with our understanding of the situation, our memories, our values, our emotions, and the models we use to order the world—anything that can help us to predict what fills in the spaces between the fragments. We might think of these projections as the mortar between the bricks in a wall.

This fragmented, patchwork way of seeing—assembling inputs to create a picture of the whole—usually works well. Because we usually operate in known spaces, with predictable routines, we can cobble together these pictures with enough accuracy to do what we need to do.

But this way of seeing has its own problems. We bring biases and other limitations to the task of seeing. As a result, we fail to see things that there—and we see things that are not there.

So what goes into seeing and not seeing? Let’s make a little list:

  • Actual data that are transmitted through your ocular system. Seeing begins with what we see. That might sound obvious, but it isn’t. What we “see” is actually but a constantly changing set of saccades—small fragments of a scene. To these fragments, we add our own knowledge, experiences, and models of the world. This might sound like damning with faint praise, but those fragments play a crucial role in helping us not to see, but to begin to see.
  • Memories of similar moments and scenes in the past. These memories can be (and almost always are) distorted. When we remember, we do not pluck a clean and accurate experience or piece of knowledge from our memory.
  • Models of how the world works. Psychologists and philosophers use the term schema to describe the mental models we have all kinds of ideas and experiences. We need these schema to get through the day. A simple example is the “model” of what happens when you touch your hand to a hot stove. A more complex model is the idea of the marketplace. In both cases, we create storthands and predictions to guide us through life.
  • Temporary and long-term emotions that color what we see and do not see. The way we feel about a situation—the emotional vibrations of love and hate, fear and hope, uncertainty and adventure, etc.—determines how we see the world. When we are scared (in fight/flight/freeze mode), we tend to narrow our attention to the crisis at hand; we act instinctively, as the amygdala takes control of attention. But when we remain calm and collected, we see more and have the opportunity to
  • External cues from people and things we trust or distrust. Humans are often described as strictly self-seeking, selfish beings—more concerned about our own survival and wellbeing than the fate of others. But the human species has actually survived because of our ability to empathize and cooperate with others. Therefore, we care about what other people think about us. We will often take certain actions in order to gain the approval and cooperation of others—not just people we already know and care about, but also perfect strangers.

Looking Forward