CONSCIOUSNESS

214 6. Culture and the Humanities
24 or 30 frames per second. ‘Suspension of disbelief’ is a concept in cinema theory used to
describe the fact that audience members psychologically allow themselves to ‘forgive’ the fact
that the images and story they are watching would, on the surface, appear to be unbelievable.
If a cinematic image appears too realistic, audience members fail to experience suspension of
disbelief, and therefore ‘disbelieve’ what they are watching. ‘High motion’ frame rates result
in increased believability but decreased enjoyment due to the audience’s perception that the
images they are viewing are ‘too real.’ We reject certain proposed theories that this is based
upon cultural conditioning, and give examples as to why such an explanation is unlikely (examples
include the Todd AO experiments in 50 frames-per-second film and British television
drama). We propose that this phenomenon is a direct result of the number of conscious events
per second in the human brain. C6
327 Art, Indeterminacy and Consciousness Robert Pepperell
(Fine Art, Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff, United Kingdom)
One of the functions of the brain and perceptual system is to categorize data from the
world into discrete meaningful chunks and so impose distinctions on the world that are consistent
with the biological needs of the perceiver. However, under certain conditions such as deep
meditation, when afflicted by particular agnosias, or when faced with visually indeterminate
stimuli, these object distinctions break down or disappear altogether. The world can then appear
as indeterminate, i.e. devoid of the objective distinctions that characterize our habitual
engagement with the world (a mode of perception termed ‘nirvikalpa’ in Indian psychology).
I will show that artists have long understood this contingent nature of objective distinctions
and tried to create works that evoke indeterminate perception by dissolving the hard, deterministic
boundaries around objects. This has resulted in varying degrees of visual indeterminacy
in art movements such as impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and abstract expressionism.
I will discuss my own paintings, which attempt to induce a visually indeterminate state in the
viewer, and the collaborative work I have done with psychophysicists and neuroscientists to
investigate the effect of indeterminate artworks on subjects’ responses and brain functions.
This indeterminacy in visual experience is analogous to the inherent indeterminacy operating
at quantum levels of reality, according to the standard Copenhagen interpretation. I will suggest
that the viewer who interprets an indeterminate image is attempting to ‘collapse’ many
potential states into an actual state in the same way states of quantum superposition are said
to collapse during observation of sub-atomic events. This, I will argue, suggests a role for
consciousness as the process by which the inherent indeterminacy of nature is resolved into
the more determinate world we experience. I will close with the claim that the experience of
trying to resolve visually indeterminate states demonstrates how the conscious mind acts to
bring the world into being for us. C6
328 Do You See What I See: Commonalities in Synesthetic Art Carol Steen
(New York)
Although awareness of synesthesia has existed for over 300 years, until relatively recently
scientists seldom studied it, believing it difficult to explore despite countless similar,
though idiosyncratic, anecdotes. They asked can synesthesia be real when what one synesthete
reports seeing has little resemblance to what another synesthete says they see when
both experience the same ‘trigger’? For example, one synesthete might describe the sound
of a trumpet as a biomorphic blue shape, yet for another, it would look like a red pinprick of
intense, moving light. In the 1920’s, one of the scientists willing to do research on people who
experienced synesthetic photisms, though only from having taken hallucinogenic drugs, was
the noted experimental psychologist, Heinrich Kluver. He, among others, wondered if there
were any commonalities in what people saw and asked them to draw or paint their visions.
He discovered that people drew the same sorts of things and he called these basic forms of
perception, “Form Constants”. However, the fact that researchers sought measurable evidence
for synesthesia presented no obstacle to genuine synesthetic artists who literally perceive the
world differently from individuals without synesthesia and who quietly use the commonalities
they experience to create their works. Even if one is not aware of having synesthesia, these