[bksvol-discuss] Re: Book in collection on selective seeing and perception, and proofreading (was Re: Re: Visual Perception)
- From: Chela Robles <cdrobles693@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012 14:22:50 -0700
Judy I wonder if there is such a book on selective hearing.
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On 6/23/2012 2:15 PM, Judy s. wrote:
There is a fascinating book that just came into the collection this
spring on the whole topic of selective perception, based on selective
seeing. It's The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel
Simons.
https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/452224/
The book description doesn't really match what the book is about.
Basically, it's about this whole topic--how do sighted people filter
out details and decide what's important to pay attention to and what
isn't. The fascinating thing they discovered about how the filtering
is a done at a level that isn't conscious, and can actually cause
sighted people to miss incredibly important details of what's
happening around us. The invisible gorilla title comes from a famous
experiment done by these two authors, where they had people watch a
basketball game and asked them details about the game. However, the
authors were really testing if the observers would see something very
unusual and obvious happening in the scene. They did that by having a
man dress up as a gorilla and mix into the crowd watching the game in
a way that should be very obvious to anyone observing the game. The
startling discovery was that fifty percent of the people they asked to
watch the game never saw the very obvious gorilla--it was invisible to
them even when they looked right at it. The whole book is about this
kind of filtering as to what people see and don't see, regardless of
what's really there to see. It's something the authors have researched
extensively to help understand what people "see" and don't see when
crimes occur, or accidents, and how this makes a difference regarding
the accuracy of things like eye witness reports during criminal trials.
This actually ties into proofreading, oddly enough! As a sighted
proofreader, when I have a book that has odd scannos in it that aren't
predictable (such as commas inserted in the wrong places as a space
comma space because the book was old and has lots of dirty extraneous
spots on the pages) I will often read a page backwards--that is, from
the bottom right hand corner of the page to the upper left hand corner
of the page. I do that because sighted readers don't really read word
by word. They learn to read by groups of words at once, words that
usually go together in a flow. Because of this, you can miss these
kinds of errors. The brain sees what it expects to see -- the
incorrect comma is the invisible gorilla. When a sighted person reads
a page backwards, they aren't reading in the way we think about
reading. The content doesn't make sense. Instead, it forces the
sighted reader's brain to look at each word and each bit of
punctuation as separate entities, not as language per se. I didn't
come up with this as a way to find errors on a page by myself, by the
way. smile. It was a technique explained in a university course I
took on speed reading, which also covered proofreading technical
material and when not to speed read.
Judy s.
On 6/23/2012 2:14 PM, Roger Loran Bailey wrote:
As a matter of fact, both selective hearing and selective seeing are
necessities. Imagine yourself on a busy street and you are trying to
have a conversation. What if every sound that entered your ears was
just as important as every other sound? Would you be able to have the
conversation at all? Of course you wouldn't. The same goes for sight.
There is so much to see in a single glance at anything that if every
detail was as important to you as any other detail then you would not
be able to process it all and you might as well be blind. It is
necessary to pick out the details that are important to you and
ignore the rest. And again, that is why a description cannot possibly
be as good as a picture. The person doing the describing filters out
the important details and mentions those. If you were the one seeing
the picture you might very well have different ideas about what was
important, but if you only hear another person's description you will
never even know about those details.
On 6/23/2012 1:50 PM, Chela Robles wrote:
Wow this is amazing, I have sighted friends and never knew they had
selective seeing kind of like some people I know have selective
hearing. Hmmm, going to ponder this too!
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