The Fovia, Television and Illusion of Consciousness


Through the ages, the eye and the idea of seeing have been used as potent metaphors which speak both of the identity and of consciousness. Yet it is commonly said that the consciousness of man is severely limited as compared to his possibilities and potentials. The common formula which one hears is that man uses five to 10 percent of the capabilities of his brain. This gives rise to numerous methodologies purported to increase this percentage. Also, the recent era of psychology and in psychoanalysis have given coin to the idea of the subconscious or unconscious, which are purported to contain primal urges and to house unacknowledged drives within the human being.

I am, in this short paper, going to use some concepts from the physiology of the eye, the ecology of survival evolution in the human species, and the powerful tug which the mechanism of television exerts upon the human psychology to show that the idea of a large and constant consciousness in the human being is erroneous, as are the ideas of the subconscious and unconscious which derive from this mistaken assumption; and I propose to show instead that a concept of an extremely limited and moving focus of consciousness against the backdrop of a large storehouse of experience and of behavioral habits and mechanisms which exist in a background field of experience is a decidedly more useful model.

The idea of the rods and cones in the retina of the eye is well-known. Knowledge of which is which is perhaps a little less common. The rods, named for their shape, are the cells in the eye which are responsible for perception of black and white and for perception in dim light. The flask shaped cones are the cells sensitive to bright light and to color. While the rods are pretty evenly distributed throughout the retina, the cones are more numerous towards the center of the retina. Another fact which is central to our discussion but rarely considered is that the power of focusing is not evenly distributed over the whole retina. In fact, most of the field of vision is quite out of focus. Anyone can discover this again by simply holding up their hand while reading this article and moving it from side to side while continuing to keep one's eyes on the reading. The hand will get fuzzier and less distinct as it is moved more and more into the peripheral vision. There is an evolutionary reason for this which we will discuss later. For now, we will introduce the concept of the fovia. The fovia is that part of the retina in the center of the eye which is focused. The fovia amounts to about 8 percent of the visual field, and from its central location the panorama gets more and more unfocused as we move peripherally.

There is a phenomenon which follows from this organization of the visual field which can be highly instructive when used as an analogy for conscious - unconscious differentiation, and which can lead us to a new appreciation both of the nature and purpose of consciousness as well as to the nature of the unconscious and its relation to our conscious identity.

There is a kind of trick which the eye plays on us. Although only approximately 8 percent of the visual field is in focus at any given moment, the fovia which contains this 8 percent is in the center of the visual field and it moves along with the eye. This means that whatever we are looking at in the moment comes into focus, and whenever we might have been looking at previously (even if it remains in the visual field) moves out of focus. As a result of this phenomenon we come over time to believe that the entire visual field is in focus, and this belief is the prime optical illusion which stays with us from early infancy, when the focus of the visual field is developed, until our end, or until macular degeneration (a disease of the fovia) robs us of the center of our vision. I contend that the relationship between consciousness and the generalized field of experience and the relationship between the fovia and the field of vision is an exact analogy which allows for an easy understanding of what are some normally difficult to understand psychological structurings.

Just as the fovia follows as the muscles of the eye move it around the generalized visual field, in the same way a small and limited focus of consciousness moves around the field of experience, giving the organism an illusion of a large and static consciousness into which ideas and perceptions move; whereas the contention of this paper is that it is the consciousness which moves against a relatively static field of experience and of stored ideological frames. With the backdrop of the physiology of the eye as our reference, it is very easy to perform some very simple experiments to see how well this analogy fits.

Right now, as you are reading this article, you probably aren't aware of the feeling of the socks and shoes you are wearing or even of your feet, until your awareness is brought to that area, whereupon your consciousness moves there. In the same way you probably aren't aware of the feeling of the hair on the back of your neck until it is brought to your attention. We could go on, naming portions of the generalized field of experience which are not currently in the fovia of consciousness and it would then move there. The feeling of the weight of the body; the air moving with the breath; the sounds that may be entering the ear, and so on. In addition, as the consciousness moves towards any of these facets of experience, consciousness of other things softens; even the consciousness of reading this article softens, beginning to move into the periphery. Then one's attention is again called to the reading and consciousness returns to the reading, leaving behind what ever fact or idea had been in awareness. None of the items in the field of experience moves. It is the fovia, or focus of consciousness which moves through the experience. Although it is usually expressed that items out of consciousness are beneath a "threshold of consciousness", the actual fact is that the unconscious or the subconscious is to the side, or sides. In fact, it surrounds consciousness on all sides.

Also, just as the muscles of the eyes can focus for distance, the consciousness can be made to maneuver backwards through memory and forward through the imagination. Suppose I ask you to remember your phone number? Where was the phone number prior to my asking you to remember it? In the generalized field of stored experience. If I ask you to remember a pleasant experience from the past it is not difficult for the consciousness to do so, but as it does the focus of the experientially present becomes blurred in the same way that the camera focuses for nearer or more distant pictures. If I ask you to imagine a fantastic scene from the future, the same phenomena happens, of a loss of focus to the experience of the present. This in no way implies that the experience of the present ceases to exists but that it moves more or less to the periphery.

In the evolution of the human organism it was very important to have had things organized in this way. We will speak of the physiology of the eye first. Man as a species spent much of his time as a hunter/gatherer, subject to attack from beasts of prey. He needed a vision which served two purposes: one, a keenness of vision which would allow him to differentiate small details required in gathering and an ability to focus for distance in order to hunt; and second, a peripheral vision which would alert him of the gross motor movements of an animal pouncing or stalking him. So the eye evolved to accomplish these two tasks; an extremely sensitive clear focus at the center of vision coupled with a large field of vision attending to the defensive task of picking up gross shapes and movements.

In the same way it was necessary that man's consciousness be able to attend to two very different tasks. One, a central focus necessary for problem solving; and second, a larger relatively stable field of dependable stimulus response.

Why is human kind so captivated by television? Although man has attended to drama and entertainment in various forms throughout his social history, there is something unique in the phenomena of television viewing which is germane to our discussion. We first need to review that the eye contains a very small area where the viewing field is in focus. A camera does not have this phenomena, only a mechanism for focusing for distance. This means that one can take pictures where the whole thing is in focus. Already we're closing in on something. At the movies, the movie theater screen is large enough that it tends to replicate the focusing experience of real-life. The television however, on a smaller screen and placed at a reasonable distance from the viewer, produces an extraordinary phenomena. The entire screen can fit into the fovia of the viewer. This exerts an almost unimaginable tug upon the consciousness.

A human being is not usually aware of these two design elements in either his eyesight or his consciousness. When he looks at a television screen he sees an amazing thing, a whole world which is perfectly in focus. To the mechanisms in the human being which are designed in defense of its safety, this has an enormously relaxing effect. It creates the illusion of an absolute and perfect safety. This is coupled with the presentation of emotionally charged scenarios being presented as a kind of pseudo life. To the parts of the human being which continue to have an urge towards hunting and gathering this pseudo life is a deeply satisfying experience. In a way, the human organism is fooled into thinking that it has actually had the experiences which it is viewing. There are parts of the brain which cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one which is fabricated, receiving all input as factual.

I am not contending that television is a bad thing, or evil. It may in fact be the single most important factor in the serious reduction of large wars which we have seen since the introduction of the television at the conclusion of the second world war. Human beings have an inherent craving for experience, some good, some bad. With the television feeding impressions into the organism which satisfy this hunger, the need to have these experiences in actual fact decrease. There are other factors which develop from this hypothesis but which are outside of the scope of this paper.

The aim of this paper is not to make assertions of uncontestable fact. It is to develop lines of thinking which can support a personal investigation of one's own subjective experience. The arguments presented are designed to generate material for a personal study. To call into question.

There is yet one more faculty of consciousness which follows upon this model but has been unstated. It is that consciousness may be enlarged by certain acts of recursive efforts. All things have three components of which one is either invisible or normally unrecognisable. In this case, it is the nature of the efforts which are required to enlarge the fovia of consciousness with any stable permanency which are difficult to discover. Because the consciousness moves so fluidly it is like Mercury. Most of the efforts which man undertakes to enlarge his consciousness simply move it around like a ball of Mercury held in the hand. Considering the line of thinking developed in this paper and attaching to it a constant redirection of the attention to the possibility of its accuracy can, over time, lead one to the hope of discovering what those efforts might be.