They say that you can't always believe what you see, but then they say that seeing is believing. It can get confusing, but the fact is that it really depends on how well yours eyes and brain work together. Some people are blind because their eyes don't work, while others simply can't see because the nerves don't work that carry information from the eyes to the visual cortex of the brain. Even so, almost all "seeing" happens in multiple places in the brain. Instant recognition of my child's face, or the immediate urge to run from a wall of fire has everything to do with unconscious decisions made by various parts of my brain that take information from all my sensory organs and make a judgement on what I see.
For example, I can see a huge wall of fire, but since I can't feel the heat I can recognize that the wall of fire right in front of me is only on the screen of the movie theater. I feel a small bit of anxiety for the characters of the movie, or awe for the spectacle, but none of the fear I would feel if my sensory organs could tell me that my eyes were seeing a fire that was "wanting" to kill me.
Last night my wife's sister-in-law sent us the photos she took of our family and I kept zooming in on my face in the ipad screen. I'm not vain, but I did not recognize the man. My wife chuckled over my shock, but what I didn't tell her was that the man I see in the mirror every day is a monster. The horror of what I feel every time that I look in the mirror or that I feel when I recall my mental image of myself is now commonplace to me, but looking at my image on the ipad screen helped me see that I cannot always trust the image my brain makes of me.
It was at that moment that I realized that my wife means all the good things she says about me. I really am an intelligent, loving man, who is successful in his chosen field. I am a little overweight, but I really can be called good looking. I really admire the man in the photograph, but I am struggling to see that he is the same guy I see in the mirror. I have read that depression messes with your perceptions of reality, but it really hit me last night how badly my depression messes with how my brain instinctively interprets what it sees. I need to remind myself that my brain tends to wear the wrong type of shades...
