How Art Made The World 人、艺术、世界 -13

Dominic, this is a new experience for me. How my eyes closed but I was seeing things? Tell me why.

There are parts of the visual brain that seem to code or represent the types of grid¹ patterns and lattices that you've been seening and presuming what's happening is the light is irritating those areas and inducing a hallucination in you. So anyone that's given this types of stimulation² will have the same types of experiences. Paradoxically, you can get exactly the same phenomenon when too little information gets into the visual system.

OK.

And certainly many subjects when they are blindfold³, they after a time will start/ to see those sort of patterns as we induce in you today.

Right. If I went into a cave with no sources of light, or blindfold myself, I might start seeing just the same sort of the things as I have seen, well.

Indeed, indeed.

This would explain the strange patterns. Deep within the darkness of the caves, prehistoric⁴ artists experienced sense re-deprivation. And this induced hallucinations of abstract shapes and patterns which our ancient ancestors then painted. But Lewis Williams realized abstract shapes were just the beginning. As people spent longer in trances, their hallucinations took the form of things of great emotional importance. As with the San, for our prehistoric ancestors that meant the animals with power had captured their imaginations.

We are going to hallucinate an eland if we are a San person, whereas if we are living in France, we're going to hallucinate a bison, shall we say? All they were seeing were horse, so culture plays an enormous role in it.

And because these images were hallucinations, they'd appeared later, be remembered as two dimensional representations. Visions flattened⁵ onto the wall of the cave.

People didn't one day invent making pictures. What happened was that people were familiar with the images that their brains were producing and being projected onto walls. And they wanted to nail down and make permanent those images as visions they saw. So they weren’t making pictures of horses that they saw outside the cave, they were nailing down visions.

Lewis Williams had finally found an answer to the mystery of how people who had never seen a picture before came to create two dimensional images all those thousands of years ago. They weren't copying nature, but reproducing visions created inside their heads.

1 grid   

n.高压输电线路网；地图坐标方格；格栅

参考例句：

• In this application,the carrier is used to encapsulate the grid.在这种情况下，要用载体把格栅密封起来。
• Modern gauges consist of metal foil in the form of a grid.现代应变仪则由网格形式的金属片组成。

2 stimulation   

n.刺激，激励，鼓舞

参考例句：

• The playgroup provides plenty of stimulation for the children.幼儿游戏组给孩子很多启发。
• You don't get any intellectual stimulation in this job.你不能从这份工作中获得任何智力启发。

3 blindfold   

vt.蒙住…的眼睛；adj.盲目的；adv.盲目地；n.蒙眼的绷带[布等]； 障眼物，蒙蔽人的事物

参考例句：

• They put a blindfold on a horse.他们给马蒙上遮眼布。
• I can do it blindfold.我闭着眼睛都能做。

4 prehistoric   

adj.（有记载的）历史以前的，史前的，古老的

参考例句：

• They have found prehistoric remains.他们发现了史前遗迹。
• It was rather like an exhibition of prehistoric electronic equipment.这儿倒像是在展览古老的电子设备。

5 flattened   

[医]（水）平扁的，弄平的

参考例句：

• She flattened her nose and lips against the window. 她把鼻子和嘴唇紧贴着窗户。
• I flattened myself against the wall to let them pass. 我身体紧靠着墙让他们通过。