“Transformers…more than meets the eye”
That’s for sure.
I can be pretty sure that the writers of the Transformers theme song did not intend for this lyric to have quite as much meaning as it does. Obviously on the outside it refers to the fact that Transformers aren’t just trucks or planes or tanks, but in fact crazy destructive robots. It can also be inferred that the writers were not psych majors, because then the lyric would probably be, “More than meets the photoreceptors, bipolar cells, ganglion cells, optic nerve, lateral geniculate nucleus, and visual cortex.” That probably wouldn’t fit into the song, anyway. Nonetheless, we who know the anatomy and neural pathways of the visual system know that in fact, everything is more than what meets the eye. The only thing that is just what meets the eye is a photon, because that hits the photoreceptors and initiates the chemical/neural pathway that encodes light in the brain and allows us to watch trucks morph into larger-than-life robots. Everything we see is the result of the complex process of vision, the trademark sensory system of the human race. If things were in fact exactly what met the eye, where would we derive our uncanny sense of irony?
I like to consider optical illusions and how they “meet the eye”. In fact, they do quite a lot more. An illusion such as this (http://web.mit.edu/hst.723/www/ThemePapers/Images/esch2.jpg) calls into play our sense of vision as well as a deep interpreting portion of our brain. We are forced to recall our past experiences with staircases (which evokes the part of the brain which deals with memory), analyze whether or not we ascended the staircase and got where we needed to go, or just climbed in an endless loop, and then apply this past knowledge to the image at hand. This is not easy to do, especially since our visual system and corresponding analyzing part of the brain is being tricked by the illusion.
Maybe the writers of the Transformers theme song should have studied a little about the visual system before they wrote those lyrics…maybe then they would have realized that their lyric doesn’t just apply to mutating robots, but to everything that our visual system processes.
