From The MIT Press Reader:
The quantification of bodies, senses, and experience did not begin with surveillance capitalism but can be traced back to mathematical and statistical techniques of the 19th century.
One day in the year 1840, a man opened his eyes and couldn’t see. This was it, the “final blow,” as he later wrote in his diary. It was as if the man, a renowned German medical doctor turned professor of physics, had inexplicably gone blind overnight. But his condition was not new. It was the dramatic culmination of months of unexplainable symptoms that had befallen this scientist: bursts of light in the eyes, headaches, nausea, lack of appetite, insomnia, and neurosis. Little did the scientist know, however, that his dire situation would eventually result in something remarkable — a startling revelation that would forever change our understanding of the human senses and how they would come to interact with machines.
No one quite knew why Gustav Fechner fell ill. Burnout, perhaps, brought on by too much work, like partially writing and editing a 7,000-page, eight-volume encyclopedia? Or turning himself into a human guinea pig in the name of science, damaging his eyesight? Fechner had stared too long into the sun using glasses with only colored filters as he explored the perceptual phenomena of afterimages — the images that stay on the retina long after one stops gazing at a light source. This series of experiments seemed to throw him into a searing, never-ending “light chaos” that he would constantly experience, even with closed eyes. He even painted his bedroom black to stop light from leaking in.
“Close to insanity,” Fechner nevertheless began to slowly recover from his malady. Instead of gradually adjusting his eyes to faint light, he took the brute force route: sudden and intensive short-term exposure to the brightness of the everyday, quickly closing his eyes before the light caused intense pain. He resumed eating, consuming such odd delicacies as raw ham soaked in wine and lemon juice, as well as sour berries and drinks. Although he still experienced “disagreeable sensations” in his head, he finally spoke again.
One October afternoon, Fechner wandered into his garden as he occasionally had done during his illness. This time, however, he took a gigantic step to reintegrate into the visual world. He removed the thick bandages covering his eyes. The light spilled in. As he glanced into his garden, the scientist experienced a miraculous sight. He saw the flowers “glowing.” They seemed to speak to him. In this ecstatic moment, Fechner came to an astonishing realization — plants must also have souls.___________Fast-forward 180 years. In the digital haze of pandemic newsfeeds, you are clicking through pages on LinkedIn. Dozens of jobs in new professions with strange sounding titles appear: vision engineer, applied perception scientist, visual experience researcher, color scientist, and neural interface engineer, the job description of which is to “help us unleash human potential by eliminating the bottlenecks between intent and action.”One career in particular catches your eye: an applied perception scientist, working for Oculus, a once-small start-up that manufactured a lightweight VR headset, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $2 billion dollars. The job announcement asks for expertise in visual perception, the “computational modeling of vision,” and “experimental and/or modeling approaches” that “help us inform AR/VR display requirements and architectures.” This new career in applied perception science also has another thing in common with the other LinkedIn jobs — it asks for knowledge in an obscure sounding discipline called psychophysics.....
....MUCH MORE