Last night a family member discussed with me a concern about his vision. Thanks to Dr. Internet, he had diagnosed himself with astigmatism, “an imperfection in the normal curvature of your eye’s cornea or lens.” He showed me some images from online of distorted car headlights on the road at night. He’ll need an updated eyeglass prescription.
I thought about how we notice things like that when they go wrong — but we rarely if ever consider all that it requires for abilities like vision and hearing to go right. An excellent summary of that is out now in a new episode of the Secrets of the Human Body series with systems engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman. The two are authors of the new book Your Amazing Body.
The episode explores “Living in a 3-D World.” Not only vision and hearing are involved but also proprioception, which means, says Laufmann, “knowing how the hundreds of parts of your body are positioned at any given moment.” The brain doesn’t “know” that consciously: as with vision and hearing, the magic goes on behind the screen of our awareness, and it has to happen all at once at every moment of waking consciousness.
Living in three dimensions is crucial not only for athletes, who excel at exploiting the body’s abilities, but for any one of us walking down the street or doing countless other routine tasks.
Laufmann outlines the relevant engineering challenges, and he and Dr. Glicksman pose the question of whether they could have been solved by purposeless emergence alone or whether, instead, purposeful design is the necessary explanation. I’ve never heard the secret of 3-D living, and the profound question it asks us, posed so succinctly. Enjoy: