The fire that comes from the eye
By Charles G. Gross
The Neuroscientist, Vol.5 (1999)
Abstract: One of the earliest ideas about vision is that it depends on light that streams out of the eye and detects surrounding objects. This view was attacked in its own time and finally disproved more than 2000 years later. Yet the idea of a beam leaving the eye persisted in beliefs both about the evil eye and the power of a lover’s gaze. It is still widely held among both children and adults.
Introduction: One of the earliest neuroscientists we know of was the pre-Socractic Alcmaeon of Croton (ca. 450 BCE). He was the first to advocate the brain as the seat of sensation and cognition and the first to dissect parts of the visual system. Presumably after observing phosphenes resulting from a blow to the head, he noted, “The eye has fire within it, for when one is struck this fire flashes out. Vision is due to the gleaming…”
This idea of vision depending on the “fire in the eye” was elaborated by Plato (427-347 BCE) in his cosmological (and rather antiscience) dialogue the Timaeus, which was enormously influential in the middle ages and beyond. Plate argued that visual fire streams out the eye and combines with daylight to form a “single homogeneous body” which serves as an instrument for detecting and reporting visual objects:
Such fire as has the property, not of burning, but of yielding a gentle light, they [the Gods] contrived should become the proper body of each day. For the pure fire within us is akin to this, and they caused it to flow through the eyes…Accordingly, whenever there is daylight round about, the visual current issues forth, and coalesces with the daylight and is formed into a single homogeneous body in direct line with the eyes, in whatever quarter the stream issuing from within strikes upon any object it encounters outside. So the whole … is similarly affected and passes on the motions of anything it comes in contact with …throughout the whole body, to the soul, and thus causes the sensation we call seeing.
Click here to read this article from Princeton University
The fire that comes from the eye
By Charles G. Gross
The Neuroscientist, Vol.5 (1999)
Abstract: One of the earliest ideas about vision is that it depends on light that streams out of the eye and detects surrounding objects. This view was attacked in its own time and finally disproved more than 2000 years later. Yet the idea of a beam leaving the eye persisted in beliefs both about the evil eye and the power of a lover’s gaze. It is still widely held among both children and adults.
Introduction: One of the earliest neuroscientists we know of was the pre-Socractic Alcmaeon of Croton (ca. 450 BCE). He was the first to advocate the brain as the seat of sensation and cognition and the first to dissect parts of the visual system. Presumably after observing phosphenes resulting from a blow to the head, he noted, “The eye has fire within it, for when one is struck this fire flashes out. Vision is due to the gleaming…”
This idea of vision depending on the “fire in the eye” was elaborated by Plato (427-347 BCE) in his cosmological (and rather antiscience) dialogue the Timaeus, which was enormously influential in the middle ages and beyond. Plate argued that visual fire streams out the eye and combines with daylight to form a “single homogeneous body” which serves as an instrument for detecting and reporting visual objects:
Such fire as has the property, not of burning, but of yielding a gentle light, they [the Gods] contrived should become the proper body of each day. For the pure fire within us is akin to this, and they caused it to flow through the eyes…Accordingly, whenever there is daylight round about, the visual current issues forth, and coalesces with the daylight and is formed into a single homogeneous body in direct line with the eyes, in whatever quarter the stream issuing from within strikes upon any object it encounters outside. So the whole … is similarly affected and passes on the motions of anything it comes in contact with …throughout the whole body, to the soul, and thus causes the sensation we call seeing.
Click here to read this article from Princeton University
Related Posts
Subscribe to Medievalverse