images of bear walking upright in new jersey and how we see

Debate in New Jersey: Is Bear That Walks Upright Suffering, or Thriving? - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/nyregion/pedals-walking-bear-new-jersey.html

the opening line of the story is: OAK RIDGE, N.J. — The first time Greg Macgowan’s wife saw the bear near their home, the upper half of the animal’s body was obscured by a neighbor’s deck. “She said, ‘Come here — there’s a guy in a bear suit,’” he recalled.

this story and its images reveal how differently we see the same animal, depending on whether we see in the bear what resembles ourselves. That vision allows, indeed forces, us to project ourselves onto and inside the animal. This is a process we do in countless ways, so that the world, like this moving bear, becomes (indeed can’t be separated from) a mirror of ourselves. The neurons that fire up with linkages, surely, to the part of the brain where neuronal linkages evoked by self are located, are no more or less ‘subjective’ or ‘interpretive’ than the ones which are fired by rods or cones in detecting motion or change or color. 

From the other direction, V.S. Ramachandran argues that it’s from the mirror neurons generating empathic reactions from observing others that the sense of oneself is created — from others inward. When the wife looks out over the deck, what she sees is intimately linked to her sense of her own body and her own movements and what they feel like from inside. 

https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-neurology-of-self-awareness.

A terrific book on how we react to what we see around us and in art, integrating neuroscience and aesthetics, and focusing on the role of the unconscious in what we see, is Eric Kandel’s  The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 100 to the Present. New York: random House, 2012.

We can see these connections in what we find compelling in what we choose to photograph, or see in others photos. On the first night, you showed photos containing an echo (of the bird in the background, for example) and suggested how powerful those are for viewers. Of the fifteen properties, that Christopher Alexander argues we are drawn to in our surroundings, is the property of echoes in nature. What appeals to us and seems a subjective experience in reacting to a particular aesthetic image isn’t only aesthetic or subjective. Rather it reflects a fundamental organizing quality of the ‘objective’ world. 

I think the reason the bear story attracts me is that it makes us lower the thresholds and barriers we usually use to separate these realms of the objective reality out there and our reaction inside.

 - Gene Slater