Week 1, Day 4: Seeing contrast

Here is a classic optical illusion that shows how easily our judgments are thrown off. I remember first seeing this illusion in elementary school. Although the horizontal lines are the same length, we usually perceive one as larger than the other.

There are several theories about why this illusion works. One theory is that our brains shift into interpreting the horizontal line as a 3-dimensional image, that we’re seeing the line as a corner of an object that is close or far away from us. A corollary of this theory is that in cultures where people do not grow up around a manufactured environment with lots of right angles (in tribes of hunter-gatherers, for example), people are not thrown off by this illusion. The evidence for this theory is inconclusive.

One of the most fascinating papers I heard presented at the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference was about the visual perception of people on psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”). It turns out that people on psilocybin are more sensitive to contrast in such optical illusions (the strength of the illusion is greater), but that they also have greater “surround suppression,” meaning they are better able to filter signal from noise (Swanson, 2022). In some ways, people on psilocybin were seeing more clearly, not less.

This illusion reminds me of something my friend Melissa Scott says. She introduced me to the term “right-sizing,” a spiritual and mental awareness that corrects our tendency to think of ourselves, our problems, or our importance as either too big or too small. I think in many ways, the Christmas story is about right-sizing the human experience and our relation to the universe when we find God in a feeding trough. It’s about filtering the signal of divine presence from the noise of the distractions that dominate our attention.

I think seeing through the eyes of Christ helps us to see things more clearly, often in ways that put us at odds with the dominant culture. Richard Rohr calls this “Christ consciousness.” This way of seeing dispels illusions that tell us one person or being is greater than another. It helps us begin to clear away some of the cultural and cognitive biases that lead us to make errors in judgment.

Prayer: God, help us to see the world through the lens of Christ consciousness. Help us to right-size ourselves, our culture, our problems, and our importance in your awe-inspiring creation. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(The above optical illusion was created by Franz Müller-Lyer in 1889. Sourced from Wikipedia.)

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