Seeing is feeling.

I am sitting in Starbucks, the sun strikes the left side of my face as I watch a young man outside.

He is lifting a small round table and dragging it a short distance along the brick-paved road, to make room for his friend.

As I watch him I literally feel what he is doing: the weight of the table beneath my upturned fingers. The sensation of the metal feet catching on the brick beneath them, the slight peak of satisfaction as it moves. The way the vibrations and the scraping sound cohere. The feeling when it is in the right place and I stop pulling.

This is what it means to observe: to feel. This is true even when we observe a cat prowling, a bird on the wing, the excitement of our dog. When we see a flag fluttering in the wind atop a building.

It works because - to varying degrees - we are built in the same way. It is an inexact connection.

(Yes, I am well aware of the neurophysiology of vision: neuronal specialisation, edge-detection, motion etc. The question remains: into what format is all this information translated for efficient encoding purposes. I believe the answer is ‘affective’).