This weekend I got to hear Yoshitoshi ABe, the creator/designer/contributor to some of my favorite anime series. While a lot of anime leans emotionally towards a tragic opera, ABe’s works are typically much more quiet and sad.
Speaking through a translator, he opened his presentation by talking about the eye. Here are my recollections of what he said (and this is all from memory):
“Does everyone here have a cell phone with a camera? Do you know how many megapixels its resolution is? On my iPhone, the resolution is 2 megapixels. The human eye has about 6 megapixels, but that’s RGB, so it’s about 2 megapixels for each color. And all the color is concentrated in the center of the eye.
“But when we see with the eye, we are not seeing reality. Our brain is taking all these bits of color and shape and combining them with our memory of what things look like. So for those of you in the back (of the auditorium), all you see is a dot, one pixels. I look like Mario. But your brain remembers what you’ve seen me look like, so you know I’m ABe.
“If you have time, do an experiment. Take three colored pencils, and hold them behind your back. Look straight ahead and slowly move one of the pencils into your peripheral vision. Your hand will look pink, because you remember it’s pink, but you will be confused as to the color of the pencil.
(ABe displays a pencil sketch on the screen of a young girl.)
“This is just lines on paper. But we see it as a face, perhaps because of some element, an eye. We remember what that looks like, and our brain creates a face. My drawings come out of memories I’ve had, and people come up to me and say that some of my drawings have drawn on memories within them, and I think that’s why.”
