My Eyes Cheat My Brain, or is it the other Way Round?

                                               My Eyes Cheat My Brain, or is it the other Way Round?

There is some cheating going on; I just do not know in which direction.

In the evening hours, say about 7 o’clock, on October 22, 2025 when the sky had turned ominously dark (all these details are unnecessary, but merely to appear precise I mention them), I was on my evening walk, in a dare without an umbrella, along a not so busy road.

The doors of the sky opened up just a bit, one might say, ajar (I do not know who put his/her foot in the door to prevent it from shutting it completely). I took shelter under the awning of a shop front. The street lights were on. In that light and against the luminaire, I saw rain coming straight down, not in sheets but large enough drops in quick succession, as there was no wind, not even a breeze.

I was stationary. And, there was light traffic on the road, both cars and two-wheelers, and all with their headlights on. I could not believe my eyes; no, not about the headlights being on (happens more often than you think)! As the vehicles moved I saw rain drops hitting the vehicles at a slant. Understand what I was flummoxed by. 

It did not matter whether the vehicles approached my location from my right or my left. Rain fell against the headlamps of the vehicles that were not moving very fast, perhaps 20-25kmph, that is all. Let me make it vivid to the readers, if the automobile was coming from my left, rain fell slanting right-to-left, and if from the right, slanting left-to-right. That is, my eyes were seeing rain coming down in two different directions, depending on the headlamp of the vehicle I am looking at. This was different from the scene in Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid in which the song Rain drops keep fallin’ on my head, they keep fallin’ is shot bone dry conditions, as I remember!

In the 71 years plus a month of my life, I must have taken in the scene on the road hundreds of times but haven’t ever noticed. Why did I notice it last night? I don’t know. My mind, in connivance with my eyes, must have played this trick on me so many times without my being aware. Just a line of philosophy here, I promise. Do we know what our sensory organs and brains together are doing? I think not. Yet, who is the I, my eyes, my mind, jointly or severally (that is a bit of mathematics)?

I could have taken snap shots of the rain against the light from the lamppost, against the headlamps of a vehicle approaching me from the right, or from the left. I have no idea, whether the camera would have been fooled as I was. I did not want a definitive answer, even if I may have got one. 

I wanted to chew on the question that arose in my mind, for the first time ever. I have read perhaps about a dozen books on where the mind is, if anywhere at all, and what it does or could do, if anything at all, and when it would fool me. For the last item, I know why people suffer from motion sickness when their vehicle traverses a hilly terrain. That, I understand happens because the brain gets distinctly different inputs from the ears and the eyes.

But, for the above situation? I do not know. I would leave it at that. The most I would do is to check the universality of my experience in other instances (rainy and dark evenings, taking shelter under the lean to of a shop), other places (other streets with light traffic), under some other streetlamps, with other types of vehicles (like large trucks trundling) and so on …

Let me affirm or negate my experience of last night.

Raghuram Ekambaram