Page 141 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)

looked at a person running or a car moving on the highway, she saw
a succession of static, strobelike snapshots instead of the smooth im-
pression of continuous motion. She was terrified to cross the street
because she couldn’t estimate the velocity of oncoming cars, though
she could identify the make, color and even the license plate of any
vehicle. She said that talking to someone in person felt like talking
on the phone, because she couldn’t see the changing facial expres-
sions associated with normal conversation. Even pouring a cup of
coffee was an ordeal because the liquid would inevitably overflow
and spill onto the floor. She never knew when to slow down, chang-
ing the angle of the coffeepot, because she couldn’t estimate how fast
the liquid was rising in the cup. All of these abilities ordinarily seem
so effortless to you and me that we take them for granted. It’s only
when something goes wrong, as when this motion area is damaged,
that we begin to realize how sophisticated vision really is. 82

Hallucinations are another example of perceptual defects.
Hallucinations generally stem from brain damage, various febrile
diseases, drug use or old age and senility. The sufferer perceives
things which do not exist—they see things which are not there and
hear non-existent sounds. Such people are wholly awake and con-
scious when they experience hallucinations, which images are
highly convincing.
These syndromes we have cited are just a few of these disor-
ders, as a result of which some people experience vivid events that
do not correspond to reality. For some people, external colors seem
very different. Our brightly colored world is like a black-and-white
film for them. If we really have direct experience of the external
world—if the world we inhabit does not consist solely of electrical
signals reaching the brain—then why do these people experience
different perceptions?
If there is just “one” external world, why do they not perceive
the outside world in the same way we do, and why do they

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