Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

294 HOW THE MIND WORKSImagery is a wonderful faculty, but we must not get carried away withthe idea of pictures in the head.For one thing, people cannot reconstruct an image of an entire visualscene. Images are fragmentary. We recall glimpses of parts, arrange themin a mental tableau, and then do a juggling act to refresh each part as itfades. Worse, each glimpse records only the surfaces visible from onevantage point, distorted by perspective. (A simple demonstration is therailroad track paradox—most people see the tracks converge in theirmental image, not just in real life.) To remember an object, we turn itover or walk around it, and that means our memory for it is an album ofseparate views. An image of the whole object is a slide show or pastiche.That explains why perspective in art took so long to be invented, eventhough everyone sees in perspective. Paintings without Renaissancecraftsmanship look unrealistic, but not because they lack perspectiveoutright. (Even Cro-Magnon cave paintings have a measure of accurateperspective.) Usually, distant objects are smaller, opaque objects hidetheir backgrounds and take bites out of objects behind them, and manytilted surfaces are foreshortened. The problem is that different parts ofthe painting are shown as they would appear from different vantagepoints, rather than from the fixed viewing reticle behind Leonardo's window.No incarnate perceiver, chained to one place at one time, can experiencea scene from several vantage points at once, so the painting doesnot correspond to anything a person ever sees. The imagination, ofcourse, is not chained to one place at one time, and paintings withouttrue perspective may, strangely enough, be evocative renditions of ourmental imagery. Cubist and surrealist painters, who were avid consumersof psychology, used multiple perspectives in a painting deliberately, perhapsto awaken photograph-jaded viewers to the evanescence of themind's eye.A second limitation is that images are slaves to the organization ofmemory. Our knowledge of the world could not possibly fit into one bigpicture or map. There are too many scales, from mountains to fleas, to fitinto one medium with a fixed grain size. And our visual memory couldnot very well be a shoebox stuffed with photographs, either. There wouldbe no way to find the one you need without examining each one to recognizewhat's in it. (Photo and video archives face a similar problem.)