Seeing is believing

Imagine living in a world almost identical to the one you know, except that every animal you see is utterly unfamiliar, a combination of claws, teeth and fur, or feathers, scales and beaks that you have never seen before and cannot identify. Or imagine that the well-known faces of friends and family, when they move, suddenly metamorphose into fish-heads or assume a curious two-dimensional appearance reminiscent of a drawing by Picasso...yet when cars or animals move they remain unchanged.

Such intriguing visions of the world belong to people with visual agnosia and other visual disturbances. Their fascinating interpretations of ordinary objects or creatures form the subject of ‘Eye See’, a series of short one-minute films which will be developed through one of this year’s Science on Stage and Screen awards. "We’re trying to find an analogue in film language to represent how these people see the world and bring this to as wide an audience as possible," explains producer Emma Crichton-Miller.

All three members of the ‘Eye See’ team - Emma Crichton-Miller, neuropsychologist Roz McCarthy and director Sal Anderson - are adamant that the most important criterion is to ensure that the films will be anchored in the real experience of patients. "So often individuals who contribute to medical knowledge turn into faceless case histories," says Roz McCarthy, who is undertaking the research for the project. "In this project we want to focus on the value of people’s personal experience."

The team will therefore be working closely with patients at every stage. "We take the images that we create back to patients to find out if they see them as plausible and valid mirrors of their vision of the world. We’re not just wheeling in a lot of fancy computer graphics to make a bizarre psychedelic picture. We want to try and capture the real essence of what these people see."

As in all truly effective science and art collaboration, the two disciplines feed into and enhance each other. Dr McCarthy tailors some of the questions she asks her patients to help inform ‘Eye See’, and also uses material from the project to feed back into her clinical research, enabling her to formulate more precise questions and design more radical experiments.

Attempts to understand how the brains of people with the unusual perceptions generated by visual agnosia go about the task of object recognition can tell us a lot about how the ‘normal’ visual system is configured by the brain. Using functional imaging and electrophysiology techniques, Dr McCarthy is hoping to record patterns of brain activation stimulated in response to sets of faces compared with sets of objects. "There’s a very distinctive brain wave form called N170 that is specifically associated with the ability to classify individual faces," she explains. "For at least one of our patients, the inability to recognise faces was accompanied by a very reduced N170 activation pattern. Everything else was ‘normal’, but the face-specific component was gone. So it seems to be a very circumscribed problem. In our future work we’re planning to try and find out exactly where in the brain these activities occur."

As well as its clinical relevance, the project has a broader agenda. "Visual agnosia is usually described in terms of deficit, damage and loss from the confident perspective of a ‘healthy norm’, with the implication that everything outside that is aberrant," observes Emma Crichton-Miller. "Yet these people’s perceptions are part of the continuum of ways of seeing that is human, and patients often describe them as compelling. One of the ambitions of this project is to suggest to the public that seeing is a highly complex and individual process, and to induce a sense of wonder in the elaborate structure of our visual worlds."

Sal Anderson, the director, agrees. "We want to help people with more ordinary vision to reflect upon the huge spectrum of ways in which the world can be seen, and to value other people’s points of view, in every sense of the word."

The most important thing, however, she asserts is that the films give as true a picture as possible of patients’ visual experiences of the world - and that at the same time they are gripping pieces, which work as stories that will fully engage the viewer. "We want to convey these perceptions to the widest possible audience - to intrigue and captivate people with their strangeness - without compromising the real experience and serious science on which the stories are based. It’s a balancing act between these different tensions."

See also

• Science on Stage and Screen: Winning projects and competition details