This reminds me of an anthropology textbook I once read. An anthropologist was studying African bushmen and wanted to see what kind of reaction they would have to a scene from the outside world. Bear in mind that these were Africans who had never seen anything outside of their normal environment of the African bush and knew nothing about what was in the broader world. The anthropologist showed them a short movie filmed elsewhere -- perhaps Europe, perhaps America -- and then asked them what they had seen. Every one of them answered that they had seen a chicken. The anthropologist was stunned. He had seen the movie many times and never saw a chicken in it. So he watched it again trying to find out what they were talking about. Finally, in one scene, for a brief instant a chicken had walked by. The conclusion was that the bushmen were seeing scenes that they had no experience of, did not know what was going on and did not even have the words to describe it. However, they were familiar with chickens and chickens were a part of their everyday lives, so it was the chicken that stood out. To the anthropologist, though, the chicken was so minor and unimportant that he had just filtered it out and did not even notice it. This is a very good example of how more than one person can see the same thing and different parts will seem important to some while it is unimportant to others. If the scene in which the chicken had appeared was a picture in a book and the anthropologist was writing the description there would have been no mention of the chicken and you, as a blind person, would not know that it was ever there. If the bushmen had been writing the description -- putting aside the fact that they probably did not know how to write -- you would have gotten a description of a chicken and you would never know that there was a lot more to the picture.
On 6/23/2012 5:15 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!
