Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Sense of Three Dimensionality

When we look directly at a person, a table, a bowl of fruit or a landscape with mountains and valleys, several pieces of information come into play in our brain so it can not only determine what we are looking at but also can develop for us a sense of three-dimensional reality. Neuroscientists who study such things refer to this 3D sense as visual-spatial awareness. The methods used by the brain to process several pieces of information are the spatial-cognitive methods.

The most important method is steropsis. We have two eyes and because they are slightly separated by distance we see things in each eye from a slightly different angle. You can see this most dramatically by holding your finger about an inch away from the tip if your nose and then alternately closing one eyelid and then the other. The brain processes the different information coming from each eye and develops a sense of depth or three-dimensionality. Though certainly everyone who ever lived and had two working eyes and a finger had discovered the different perspectives we see with each eye, it took Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), a British physicist to demonstrate that this was an important thing for sense of depth.