Occipital Lobe (Seeing Things)

Occipital Lobe: The occipital lobe processes visual information, which is how we recognize faces, scenes, and make sense of what we see. But seeing is not the same as understanding, and vision alone can distort and shape how we judge people.

The first time I saw the system firsthand, I didn’t see justice. I saw cages. As part of my internship with the Bergen County Commissioner’s office, I went on a tour of one of our county prisons. But not just any prison, the maximum security one. The image is still ingrained in my mind. The high security doors. The clank of the keys. The men locked away and watched me, like caged animals in a zoo. Or perhaps a lion watching his prey. I recall thinking that if you are able to look at someone like that long enough, you begin to forget that they are even human.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with this feeling. I think there was a part of me that wanted to look away. It was easier to justify that the people inside these walls deserved every bit of what this building was designed to do to them. But there was another part of me that couldn’t help but stare at the details. The way they stood when we walked past them. The way some wouldn’t make eye contact, and others would hold the stare too long. The way the room just didn’t feel like rehabilitation or safety. It just felt like controlling them. 

Later, at Harvard, I saw a different side of the law. I saw lawyers discuss their clients in terms that were almost sacred. We do not judge. We represent. It was in that environment that I was forced to consider the same question I had dodged in the prison. If an individual is a murderer, if an individual is violent, if an individual is truly dangerous, do they still deserve rights? Does they still deserve procedure, dignity, and protection from being treated less than human? My initial reaction was to argue with myself. I wanted the answer to be simple. I wanted to believe I could place people in categories where empathy is not an option.

But what I saw in that work was challenging. I saw how quickly society can turn a person into a label, and how law is often the only thing that can stop that process from becoming absolute. I saw something else too…something uncomfortable. I saw that seeing is not necessarily objective. Seeing is not necessarily rational. Seeing is not necessarily the whole truth. You see, the occipital lobe is associated with seeing. This part of my story is associated with seeing that what you see is not necessarily what is true. Law is about seeing the facts, the context, seeing humanity. 

Vision seems to be an objective process due to the immediacy of it, but vision is not the same as just taking a mental picture. Although vision involves the processing of visual information via the occipital lobe, what one perceives as vision is the result of interpretation,  prediction, and even context. Predictive processing theories hold that our perceptions are the product of combining sensory information with expectations. Therefore, the brain is always guessing at what it is perceiving, making predictions about that perception and then continually updating its guesses (Clark, 2013). That’s why my first impression of the prison was so intense. The environment was built to send a message, and my brain decoded it quickly. The bars, locks, keys, uniforms, and controlled movement all train the eye toward threat and control.

This is also the reason that dehumanization can occur even if no words are said. In the visual frame, it’s possible to objectify the human being. A person in prison is reduced to a category. Once that’s been done by the brain, it will be more difficult to look for the humanity beneath it. It’s because you lack kindness or empathy. It’s because the brain is very efficient and can become indifferent to morality when it feels like doing so.

Law demands a kind of disciplined vision. It demands that you notice facts and context, not just the emotional weight of an image. It also demands that you resist the cultural images of who deserves rights. 

References

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477