today

Off to a good start with this week's painting. I spent most of the day setting the still life up. That's a Romulus and Remus statue , in case you're unsure. I could probably finish it tonight, since John is gone. He has a conference in the States all week.

Since I've written about the "naughty little gnome", I have been curious to learn more about perception. I came across a disorder called Charles Bonnet Syndrome. This is a common disorder in which people with damage to their sight pathways either in the eye or the brain, experience vivid hallucinations which replace the missing visual information. In 1760, a Swiss philosopher named Charles Bonnet became concerned when his grandfather began to experience a parade of "amusing and magical visions." The eighty-nine-year-old was being visited by visions of people, birds, carriages, and buildings, all of which were invisible to everyone but him. Apparently these mysterious objects materialized spontaneously among the few bits of the world he was still able to perceive through his cataracts. Charles cataloged his grandfather's hallucinations and the condition became known as the Charles Bonnet Syndrome.(CBS)

It is interesting to know that people with this disorder are not mentally unstable. In fact, it seems more likely to occur in individuals with higher education.( another reason I should have gone to graduate school)

I may have gone off on a tangent, but I find it so intriguing that when the brain doesn't receive confirming visual stimuli, it is free to make up it's own reality.

I couldn't really see what the" little naughty gnome "was doing in that garden, so my mind made up the rest.