3. WHERE DO APPLES GROW?
We all have heard small children ask whether apples and oranges grow in stores. "Of course not," we tell them. "Fruit grows from the ground somewhere out in the countryside, and then it's put into trucks and brought to the stores." But is this true? Have you seen that? Do you have a sense that what you are eating was once alive, growing on its own?
We learn in schools that fruit grows from the ground. We see pictures of fruit growing. But when we live in cities, confined to the walls and floors of our concrete environments, we do not actually see the slow process of a blossom appearing on a tree, then becoming a bud that grows into an apple. We learn this, but we cannot really "know" what it means, or that a whole cycle is operating: sky to ground to root through tree to bud ripening into fruit that we can eat. Nor do we see particular value in this knowledge. It remains an idea to us, an abstraction that is difficult to integrate into our consciousness without direct experience of the process. Therefore we do not develop a feeling about it, a caring. In the end how can our children really grasp that fruit growing from trees has anything to do with humans growing from eating the fruit?
Everyone knows about night and day. Half the time it's dark, half the time it's light. However, it doesn't work that way in our homes or outside in the streets. There is always light, and it is always the same, controlled by an automatic switch downtown. The stars are obscured by the city glow. The moon is washed out by a filter of light. It becomes a semi-moon and our awareness of it inevitably dims.
We say it is night, but darkness moods and feelings lie dormant in us. Faced with real darkness, we become frightened, overreact, like a child whose parents have always left the light on. In three generations since Edison, we have become creatures of light alone.
PART II
SENSORY DEPRIVATION ENVIRONMENT: MODERN OFFICE BUILDING
1. AS A DESIGN PLAN IN A HUMAN MIND
The modern office building is the archetypal example of the mediated environment. It contains nothing that did not first exist as a design plan in a human mind. The spaces are square, flat and small, eliminating a sense of height, depth and irregularity. The decor is rigidly controlled to a bland uniformity from room to room and floor to floor. The effect is to dampen all interest in the space one inhabits.
Most modern office buildings have hermetically sealed windows. The air is processed, the temperature regulated. It is always the same. The body's largest sense organ, the skin, feels no wind, no changes in temperature, and is dulled.
Some buildings even use "white noise," a deliberate mix of electronic sounds that merge into a hum. Seemingly innocuous, it fills the ears - with an even background tone, obscuring random noises or passing conversations that might arouse interest or create a diversion.
The light remains constant from morning through night, from room to room until our awareness of light is as dulled as our awareness of temperature, and we are not aware of the passage of time. We are told that a constant level of light is good for our eyes, that it relieves strain. Is this true? What about the loss of a range of focus and the many changes in direction and intensity of light that our flexible eyes are designed to accommodate. Those who build artificial environments view the senses as single, monolithic things, rather than abilities that have a range of capacity for a reason. We know, for example, that our eyes can see from the extremely dark to the extremely bright, from far to near, from distinct to indistinct, from obvious to subtle. They perceive objects moving quickly and those that are still.
The eye is a wonderfully flexible organ, able to adjust instantly to a dazzling array of information, constantly changing, multileveled, perceiving objects far and near moving at different speeds simultaneously. A fully functioning visual capacity is equal to everything the natural environment offers as visual information. This would have to be so since the interaction between the senses and the natural environment created the ranges of abilities that we needed to have. Sight did not just arrive one day, like Adam's rib; it co-evolved with the ingredients around it which it was designed to see. When our eyes are continually exercised, when flexibility and dynamism are encouraged, then they are equal to the variety of stimuli that night and day have to offer. It is probably not wise always to have "good light" or to be for very long at fixed distances from anything. The result will be lack of exercise and eventual atrophy of the eyes' abilities.
2. HUMAN BEINGS AND SENSORY INFORMATION
When we reduce an aspect of environment from varied and multidimensional to fixed, we also change the human being who lives within it. Humans give up the capacity to adjust, just as the person who only walks cannot so easily handle the experience of running. The lungs, the heart and other muscles have not been exercised. The human being then becomes a creature with a narrower range of abilities and fewer feelings about the loss. We become grosser, simpler, less varied, like the environment.
The common response to this is that if we lose wide-spectrum sensory experience, we gain a deeper mental experience. This is not true. We only have less non-mental experience so the mental life seems richer by comparison. In fact, mental life is more enriched by a fully functioning sensory life.
In recent years, researchers have discovered some amazing things about the connections between mental and physical life by conducting sensory-deprivation experiments. In such experiments, a human subject is cut off from as much sensory information as possible. This can be accomplished, for example, by a totally blank environment -white walls, no furniture, no sounds, constant temperature, constant light, no food and no windows. A more thorough method is to put the blindfolded subject inside a temperature-controlled suit floating in a water tank with only tubes to provide air and water, which are also at body temperature. This sensory-deprivation tank eliminates the tactile sense as well as an awareness of up and down.
Researchers have found that when sensory stimuli are suppressed this way, the subject at first lives a mental life because mental images are the only stimulation. But after a while, these images become disoriented and can be frightening. Disconnected from the world outside the mind, the subject is rootless and ungrounded.
If the experience goes on long enough, a kind of madness develops which can be allayed only by reintroducing sensory stimuli, direct contact with the world outside the subject's mind.
Before total disorientation occurs, a second effect takes place. That is a dramatic increase in focus on any stimulus at all that is introduced. In such a deprived environment, one single stimulus acquires extraordinary power and importance. In the most literal sense, the subject loses perspective and cannot put the stimulus in context. Such experiments have proven to be effective in halting heavy smoking habits, for example, when the experimenter speaks instructions to stop smoking or describes to the subject through a microphone the harmful, unpleasant aspects of smoking.
EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE BRAIN, PAGE 2 |
|
