“A picture’s worth a thousand words.”

“Seeing is believing.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

As these adages and countless others go to show, people are very visual beings. Our language, culture, and knowledge of the world around us are shaped by the information we gather with our eyes more than any other sense.  The visual cortex in the brain is one of the most active areas and it is constantly processing and analyzing incoming information, applying the signals received from our eyes, and informing the rest of the brain how to respond based on that incoming information.  The power of sight is so overwhelming that we call our personal philosophy and understanding of ourselves and our place in humanity and the universe our “world view,” tying even our basic interpretation of life itself to the power and language of sight. Continue reading →