Of sight, and insight

The story of the human eye, vision, human perception, and how we see the world continues to intrigue the realms of philosophy, psychology, and ophthalmology. But whether it was the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes and his theories of the brain's pineal gland representing the location of the human soul, which palaeontologists later described as an ancestral “third eye”, or modern psychology's attempts to explain perception beyond physical visual function, the eye and its relation to how we make sense of the world still remains poorly understood. In Plain Sight at the Wellcome Collection, London, UK, does not attempt to reconcile such ambiguities, but through diverse, interactive exhibits asks us to “open up to seeing in different ways”, according to co-curator Laurie Britton Newell. Her impetus for creating the exhibition partly grew from the increasingly profound societal toll that visual impairment is anticipated to have globally over the coming decades.