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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 grid 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 stimulation 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 blindfold, 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, prehistoric 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 flattened 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.
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