Dr. Lee Jin-soo's Plastic Surgery Essay 38 - Is What You See Really the Truth?

 

This artwork is "Sunrise - Impression" painted by Claude Monet, a representative figure of Impressionism at the end of the 19th century. It's a famous painting that served as the archetype of Impressionism. It expresses the feeling of the sunrise, which changes every moment. However, when you look at this painting, the colors vary slightly depending on whether you see it in person, through a book, or on a monitor, or depending on the sources that introduce it. Looking at pictures with different color schemes makes you desire to fly to Paris to see this painting in person.

However, upon closer reflection, is what you see when you actually see it in person the true colors of the painting? Even when you see it in person, colors may appear differently depending on conditions like lighting and viewing angle.

What do people believe in? What do they trust the most? There's a saying that you should believe only what you see with your own eyes. In other words, you can only believe something with certainty when you see it with your own eyes. But is what you personally see truly real? Is it okay to completely trust what you've seen?

The object we want to see may create an optical illusion due to visual effects caused by other objects around it. Let's take two lines, both of equal length. Now, let's draw diagonals at different angles at each endpoint.

Well, what do you think? Even though the two lines are actually of the same length, they definitely appear to be different in length when you look at them now, right? Ultimately, even when we look at the same thing, we can perceive it differently each time depending on factors like time, location, brightness of light, and surrounding objects.

In other words, an optical illusion occurs not because we initially perceive the object's information incorrectly, but rather due to the brain's misconception during the process of processing the visual information it receives.

Next, our vision has a persistence effect. Our vision cannot capture rapid changes in images over a very short period. Approximately 1/16th of a second of an afterimage remains. Every image we perceive is not a momentary image at each instant but a composite image of changes over about 1/16th of a second. Movies take advantage of this visual flaw. Although movies quickly show 24 frames per second, we perceive them as moving images without recognizing each individual frame.

Ultimately, what we see is not just the image formed on the retina like a photograph but the visual information processed in the visual cortex in the brain's occipital lobe. Therefore, various distortions occur in this processing process compared to the actual image.

The optical illusions and persistence effects mentioned above are generally occurring visual distortions with little individual variation. When our brains receive and interpret visual images, personal experiences and momentary emotions come into play, resulting in further distortions of the image.

Humans have a strong tendency to see things as they already know, believe, and want to see. Moreover, there is a tendency to view things in the direction we hope and wish for.

In this regard, the world-renowned British painter David Hockney said the following:

"We see with memory. Because my memory is different from yours, even if we stand in the same place, we do not see the same thing. We have different memories. Therefore, different factors come into play. Whether you have been to a place before, how well you know it, etc., will influence you. Therefore, there is never an objective perspective. It's always like that."

We have a tendency to wholeheartedly believe what we see with our own eyes. However, as mentioned earlier, what we actually see is never absolute and can vary significantly depending on various factors.

Instead of thinking that what we directly see with our own eyes is the immutable truth, I believe it's important to adopt an attitude that acknowledges the possibility that what we see may be distorted through our own filters, differing from reality.