Feeling and seeing belong together. I’ve said so for years.

From Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B – abstract (my clarifying additions):

People see with feeling (something I’ve been saying for 20 years). We ‘gaze’, ‘behold’, ‘stare’, ‘gape’ and ‘glare’. In this paper, we develop the hypothesis that the brain’s ability to see in the present incorporates a representation of the affective (emotional) impact of those visual sensations in the past (meaning you don’t actually “see” – you FEEL + SEE). This representation makes up part of the brain’s prediction of what the visual sensations stand for (meaning = emotion+visual stimulus) in the present, including how to act on them in the near future (based on how we feel about what we see, we act accordingly). The affective prediction (emotional interpretation) hypothesis implies that responses signalling an object’s salience, relevance or value do not occur as a separate step after the object is identified (seeing = FEELING + SENSUAL INPUT). Instead, affective (emotional) responses support vision from the very moment that visual stimulation begins.

You see AND feel – never see alone. Your visual signals pass through and interact with the emotional parts of your brain – so OF COURSE you’d attach feeling to visual stimulus. I’ve said it for many years and every Rapid Eye Technician knows it from experience. Nice to see that someone is considering doing some solid science about our hypothesis and experience.