Slashdot Mirror
Strong Emotions May Cause Temporary Blindness
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Ever been watching tv when a violent image comes on the screen and you don't even notice that somebody just entered the room? You've just encountered something known as emotion-induced blindness. Psychologists at Vanderbilt and Yale Universities have determined that people can suffer short periods of blindness, up to 1/2 a second in length, immediately after seeing highly emotional images. By displaying a series of images for 1/10 of a second each they were able to determine that test subjects couldn't identify images shown immediately after very erotic or gory images. You can try this out for yourself at the flash-based test site they have set up which also contains more details of the experiments."
is that why im blind?
Blindness is a poor and imprecise term for this finding and these findings are simply an extension of work performed in situational awareness. As one who's research deals with the neuroscience of vision and blindness, I have to say that "attention" or even "situational awareness: would be a better word/term, rather than "blindness". No offense to the authors of this study, but that sort of terminology might be expected of psychologists. :-) Seriously though, blindness implies a fundamental defect in the visual processing pathways as opposed to a failure to bring attention to a change in presentation due to conflicts of attention in higher or associative cortical processing. Now, if they demonstrated a lack of visual evoked potential in cortex, that might be something.
The failure to attend to or notice changes in your environment due to more traffic in cortical associative areas is not surprising really, and has long been known by cognitive scientists working with Air Force pilots. The more tasks required or stress induced upon a situation will degrade attentive performance and result in missing changes introduced into the environment.
For all you gamers out there, this is sort of an intuitive concept, right? How many times have you missed the doorbell, telephone or significant other trying to get ahold of you in the middle of a Doom/Marathon/Unreal fragfest? You increase the number of participants (and thus tasks to attend to) and you decrease your situational awareness of your immediate surroundings.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Blind with rage'
Now that's a very good idea to put a reference to erotic images and a link to a flash-based site on the main page of slashporn^H^H^H^Hdot.
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Somebody Else's Problem... Art imitating life, or life imitating art?
Wanking DOES cause blindness.
or a tight grip on yer pecker?
It all makes sense now. I was wondering why I could never find the mouse after reading VB code.
Take the Dragon Survey
This just in... Pr0n does make you blind... Temporarily at least
Oh... so my poor vision is caused by my EXCITEMENT, not what I DO when I am so horn^h^h^h^h happy.
Free as in FreeDom
temporary blindness after an intense and violent slashdotting.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Witnesses to a crime often have problems remembering what happened after a traumatic event, to the extent that they often give conflicting accounts of which direction a suspect fled. This research indicated that they might not have processed that information because of the emotional overload.
So that's why you can turn blind if you masturbate?
WHY DIDNT ANYONE TOLD ME BEFORE!
Everybody knows that you go blind if you ...er...look... at erotic images for too long.
And you get hairy palms.
Porn does make you blind! Hell, look at the name of the effect: "attentional rubbernecking."
I didn't notice someone walking into the room after I saw the beard on that guy's frekkin face!
For all the Aussie's in the house, he looks like that dude who's in every Midday Movie on 7!
-Sj53
to porn-induced blindness?
er, tubgirl?
This is the first time the bots and spammers goatse-links will be of actual use!
It's not that it causes slight blindness, but the images in the flash demo move too damn fast. It doesn't matter if it contains blood/gore, etc... because you can't see it anyway, it's too fast.
I'm a conservative and I really dislike Bush. he spends money like a drunken sailor, he won't support a ban on "Gay" marriage, and there are dozens more reasons to dislike him.
So, you can join the Bush cult and pretend he's conservative, but just know you have no principles.
Until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that this is the most elaborate Goatse troll ever.
Breakfast served all day!
I usually have pretty good reaction times, and in the flash test, purely by chance (well, okay, just because, having conducted psych research myself, I like to screw with their heads) I chose the third sequence first.
I didn't see the target.
I replayed that thing about a dozen times before I finally caught it.
I suspect I missed it because "rotated 90 degrees" doesn't stand out enough to notice, with such complicated images and only a tenth of a second per image - Though I suppose using something like simple brightly colored shapes would tend to make the "graphic" image stand out unduly.
Anyway, once I finally spotted the target image in the last sequence, I nailed it first try in the first two sequences (the ones supposed to induce temporary blindness).
Then again, perhaps I just have a deep fear of fire hydrants, while bloody stumps don't really phase me.
To me that whole flash thing only messed up my eye sight a bit from the picture changing so much so fast. Which is what their probably talking bout. But i rather see them do a study on people playing video games being oblivious to the world around them, aka enviroment, as in people walking by. And a study on how people are when they are playing video games vs not playing video games in terms of brain waves, pulse etc. And than another wide spread test on video games and concentraion, since in my case i had a lack of concentration before i became a gamer and now i can sit down and work on something hours on end without loosing my focus, i like science to point out thats possible.
...they should have used Goatse.
President Bush comes on TV, and some of his more radical opponents are so blinded with rage that they become immune to logic...
Naw, the theory assumes that the person actually has a brain that gets distracted. Politicians have evolved the ability to completely ignore this particular organ. Nice try though...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Even with my contacts a bit blury I was still able to spot all 3 images.
Though I could care less about the bloody hand... the picture just didn't look right. Of course it could mean I'm just not very sensitive to detached limps.
Maybe it's from too many shooters, but I'm pretty sure I could have scored a head shot there.
Try some porn next time folks!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
In my early 20's (I'm in my late 30's now) I learned what the phrase "seeing red" meant. For some reason I was quite angry -- suddenly -- at a grocery clerk and as I got mad my peripheral vision narrowed until my vision was swallowed up with a dark redness. Almost like I was passing out. I literally could not see until I calmed down. This incident took a few seconds to transpire but I'll never forget it.
I guess with age I've mellowed, as I haven't been as mad as that since losing the contest for the Slashdot Cruiser -- well, maybe since the Karma Cap was instituted... or was the last time when I saw my first Microsoft ad on Slashdot? Hmmm...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I can't see the target image in any sequence... because it's a low-contrast image. The fire hydrant and the farm house however, stand way out, contradicting the thesis.
I tried to type a response here but I think I was blinded by this useless crap...
... lets see what experiment we can do that really proves nothing .. and oh let also base it on statistical analysis since no one can raise objections to our results.
.....
Dick 1: Now that we have finished this what next ?
Dick 2: Hmm
Dick 3: How about the blindness caused after intense masturbation.
Dick 1: Dick 3.. you seem to have something there
and then it begins all over again
Blindness last longer than a split second though, its a good 5 minutes before i can see normally again.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Might such periods of "blindness" be in part responsible for the inability of crime witnesses to recall details, and, for conflicting crime reports by witnesses.
There is the classic gambit of a law professor having a mock murder take place in front of law students to test their ability to recall details correctly. OTOH there was Aldus Huxley who, when left alone at home, would answer the door, deal with whomever was at the door, and, then return to his work without any memory of having dealt with some mundane task. A. Huxley was also able to recall, verbatim, pages of his college texts after having been given only a slight prompt.
Charles Tart in his book Altered States gives a fun run down on some of the oddities of human consciousness.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
If you play with the flash-based demonstration on TFA's site, you'll see that the gap, if any, is speedy indeed.
(For those who didn't / couldn't / wouldn't go to the site, basically it's a series of more or less random images, each one staying for 1/10th of a second or so, with a "target" image buried in the sequence. The "target" is identifiable because it's rotated 90 degrees)
However, they don't include a control: a series of images *without* a a "disturbing" image. From my way of thinking and from my firsthand experience with the site, it may be that the same "blindess" would be caused whenever there's an image rotated 90 degrees.
I'm sure the research is more thorough than that, but the implementation here doesn't seem to reflect that. Unless I'm just missing something.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Wh0 dp I su34?
Shed new lights on how masturbation makes you blind.. now we know they've been right all along...
geek page at KY speaks
When researchers at Fox News discovered that by repeatedly displaying images of the September 11 attacks, they could blind the American public to the actions of their government for up to four years
"Hysterical blindness" is an accepted term for a condition where the physical parts are working but the processing is either not happening or not being accepted by whatever accepts vision. And how about those poor "stripe-blind" kittens that were reared with nothing but strong vertical or horizontal lines ... and became unable to "see" lines in the other direction.
Obviously, the next step is to see whether the inputs briefly shut down, or if the input is ignored because of a rush of brain activity.
I saw my mom having sex once, I never saw the same after that. Is that the same thing?
I just tried the flash test out (before it gets slashdotted...) and I think I saw the image every time. It was kind of confusing, however, because I couldn't really register the images that came along. So I'm not certain if I did see it in tests B or C - something looked out of the ordinary, but I couldn't say what. That said, the injured hand really did stand out. But is that because it was a gross pic, or because it was a different and more vivid colour to the others? Not certain, but interesting test nonetheless. Quite a clever way of testing this.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Women will also use this as proof that certain strong emotions in men last only a few seconds.
Well just know that you don't have a sense HUMOR!
This is very timely in light of recent news that the eyewitness accounts of the tube shooting of Charles de Menezes, were just completely wrong. Despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary, he was not wearing winter clothing, he had not jumped the turnstile, was not chased into the train by police, etc. Amazing.
Let me get this right, if you look at something, and it catches your attention, for whatever reason..then...you can't focus on anything else. WOW. what a revelation. So you mean when I'm driving down the road and I see a porno billboard, I can't help to look...I really needed this research to point this out to me.
Thanks!
Oh for crying out loud, give it a rest. You'd probably be a lot happier with Kerry in office just so you'd really have something to complain about. I've definitely got bones to pick with Bush, mostly related to his beholdeness to the religious right, but finding him to be a better C-in-C than the alternative doesn't exactly make me a cult member. My principles don't allow me to vote for a guy I like even less (or note vote at all) just because the guy that at least echos some of what I like isn't my entire philosophical clone.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That canard. Watch me roll my eyes.
When the eye moves, it temporarily shuts off the flow of visual data to the brain. That is why you don't experience the world swirling around as your eye darts from detail to detail. Experiments using an eye tracker found that one could change parts of the scene in the middle of the eye movement and the subject wouldn't notice the change. The tests looked at how severe a change was needed to make people notice that the scene was different -- colors of objects could change, people could be added to pictures, etc.
The coolest experiment used an eye tracker that painted words on the screen only where the fovea (the high resolution central portion of the retina) was looking and painted "X"s on the screen everywhere else (the low resolution bulk of the eye). Every time the subject's eye moved, the screen was redrawn to show the words where they were now looking and hide the words were they weren't looking. Subjects could read documents normally and were totally unaware that the screen was, in reality, full of "x"s except where their central field of vision happened to be pointing.
The point is that the eye & brain is not a simple pixel-based camera.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Man oh man I wonder how many moderators you just made blind with that post! You are gonna get so nuked, if they manage to see the "Flamebait" button...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Paying attention to something :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I timed my blinking so that i blocked out the gory picture, I was still unable to identify the rotated image. Perhaps the pictures were just flashed to fast.
Why is this flamebait? This is actually quite funny and on topic. Sheesh get a sense of humour you mods...!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's called, "focus". Now go apply yourself.
Images that are flashed with such a short delay make it difficult to process images that are sideways.
Or maybe I'm just slow, but in any case the lesson I learned from this experiment is don't play with knives.
What would happen if there were a series of emotional images being presented? Would you still be "blind" to certain ones, only picking up on the ones that caused more emotion within you? Or would you see them all because they elicited some sort of an emotional response out of you?
Peril sensitive sunglasses anyone?
There is a very interesting online java demo available here http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html that gives a great example of "sustained inattentional blindness". It is provided as a supplement to a paper published in "Perception. 1999;28(9):1059-74." In the video, the audience is told to count how many times the white team passes the ball. During the video, a man in a gorilla suit walks by, and most people fail to notice him. I have spoiled it however, and now you will NOT be unable to notice him.
First you animate. Then you SUSPEND!!!
Going through there test I seem to have just as hard of a time seeing the picture after the fire-hydrant as I do seeing the picture after the bloody hand. By the time my brain actually recognizes the picture and realizes, "Hey, that's the picture. I need to remember the picture after this one," it's too late and the next picture has already flown by.
But perhaps why it's even harder yet to see the picture of the bloody hand after all the scenic images is because 1) that image is something that you don't see everyday so it takes a second to realize what exactly you're looking at and 2) that image doesn't belong next to all of those pictures of scenery.
I don't think this has as much to do with blindness from obscene pictures as it does the time it takes for your brain to actually figure out what it is you're looking at. Things that you see everyday (like porn to slashdot readers) your brain is accustomed to seeing and is quicker at realizing what it is.
This confirms what my mother told me: watching pr0n WILL make you go blind!
They are so outraged by the editor's comments, that they fail to notice the links to the fine article.
This sig is intentionally blank
series c had the 90 degree picture shown after a regular-type picture. then, the flash demo said something to the effect of "it's delay is smaller than both series a and b, but more people recognize the 90 degree rotated image."
was actually a Flash animation. Like I'm going to click that thing.
I couldn't see the target image in either the 2nd or 3rd sequence, it just goes by too fast. I can only recall the farm house and tree, and I think that is only because I saw them in the first sequence.
Yes. This should be a known thing. We all know some close their eyes while doing.....
I tried the little test and I have to say that I am pretty skeptical. I saw the rotated image on the first set of pictures. I read the text afterword and once they identified the "emotional" image as a bloody hand I could see that image in great detail but NONE of the other images including the ones that came before the bloody hand. I certainly hope that they didn't tell their test subjects "after you see the image of Jack the Ripper attacking a victim tell us what comes next."
I like how you just know these things, your a scientist right?
Heh ... yup ... I guess some people think that "just knowing" something makes them smarter than these "dumb" scientists, who have to go through the burden of actually proving their hypotheses ;) I guess the fallacious reasoning involved to create this self-delusion is something along the lines of "you spent months studying that? I could have given you teh answer in just a few seconds!!1!"
look at? I'm just wondering what the specific images are.
I go blind whenever I walk past an Apple store. Maybe if I had money in my wallet, I could see the store and go in.
Strange, I took the test and the ONLY image I was able to identify was the one that followed the "disturbing" image.
I also woke up about 2 minutes ago... the fact that I'm already on slashdot is probably more disturbing than a bloody hand.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
When you view the flash file, option C is the control with no "emotional" image. When I looked at C, I could not see a sideways building, no matter how many times I watched it.
I personally think that this is a bunch of crap. Requiring a person to interpret an image that is skewed should require more mental effort then a properly oriented image and would be more difficult to process when you might already be processing a gory image and questioning just what you saw.
I would like to see the test done again, but instead of a complicated image, like a sideways building, why not use a large black arrow on a white background. I think that a simplistic object like an arrow would be easier to discern and would likely be noticed and its direction easy to determine. Would a lower processing requirement make the "blindness" less blinding?
Blindness? What about simple distraction? Carnage and nudity are probably one of the few things that would make most anyone take another look at something-- just to make sure that they were seeing what they thought that they were seeing. Other things that would make a person double-take would require a context. For example, if you are sitting in your office and a horse walks by your door... you would likely have a reaction similar to seeing gore or nudity for a split second, but you can't provide a context when flashing images, so I think gore and nudity are all you are left with to evoke a "mental double-take."
What if the image wasn't gory? What if in a series of tests they made the gory image less and less discernable, at what point would the effect be eroded? What about putting in something unexpected? Place a skewed image of something easily discernable (iconic) like a sideways Captain Crunch character or an upside down Nike Swoosh. Does an image that makes you mind work harder have the same effect. How about a word... place a misspelled or scrambled word before the sideways building... does it have the same effect? What about showing someone what the sideways building looks like before showing the clips, would that have any effect?
What leads them to attribute this to emotional response? Replace the gory image with a photo of a loved one or a cute animal, is the response the same? How do they gauge an emotional response to an image?
Maybe I am missing something, but this seems like bad science to me.
Just my $0.02 --
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
nuff said, why is he +4 insightful?
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
Let me say, bullshit!
First of all, the target images are different
in sequence A than in sequences B and C;
Try hitting Print Screen at the right time and
you'll see.
In fact, they are completely different from the thumbnails. For A it is much more distinguisable than for B and C.
Im sure, comparing these yields completely accurate predictions.
What is the deal if I don't see the images twisted 90 degrees?
q
When I was younger... and still... but much more when I was younger, I would experience a kind of electrical shock sensation that would make my vision go funny for a split second right before I did something that was dangerous or ballsy. Especially if I was about to do something mean. I always considered it a kind of hardwired morality/self-protection faculty. Haven't met anyone or read anything that very much corroborated with this prior to this.
What does it mean when you can only spot the picture in sequence B. For some reason that is the only of the series that I can spot the rotated picture and is the one everyone else scored the lowest in and has the bloody hand. Perhaps I see the hand and start paying attention... How weird.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
...sunglasses I just got of the blackmarket are nothing but a hoax ? My brain does that already ?
Arthur, give me back my money !
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Who needs a flash based test to go blind? We've all been collecting these things for years: Shock Sites
If you can't process or retain any visual information, you're blind. Why does it matter if it's a low level or high level failure?
It might be interesting to see what the results of this are on psychopaths. With their resilience to emotional overload, they may be totally unaffected. On the other hand, they may become 'overloaded' by totally different kinds of image to your normal human being.
;)
(I've heard psychopathy referred to as 'a fear deficit disorder'. Something I've often felt as if I may have a borderline case of. Its saved my ass many times
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
ahha! yes I knew it was true, now this proves it! ..no seriously this is the most idiotic study I've ever seen. If the flash based test was any indication of actual tests used in their study then its ridiculous. The pictures are going so quickly that a reference to a picture tilted 90 degrees to the left or right would be difficult to spot anyways. I couldn't even make out what most of the pictures represented. You might as well flash a bunch of pictures and ask me to find Waldo!!!
I use what got me into that mess to get me out. I find that grabbing your pants, screaming FIRE FIRE!!!! and escaping in the ensuing confusing works best. She's looking for the fire your looking for the door. Any stage magician would understand. Also any current bachelor.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
There have been cases of emotional blindness and deafness that are permanent. Various experiments have shown that people thus inflicted can regain, at least ppartially, their sense when the trauma is blocked by hypnosis.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
My brothers and I operate a chain of grocery stores in Jamaica. Two months ago, one of the small stores was invaded by four gunmen who made the staff lie on the floor, shooting three of our employees in the process; fortunately their wounds were minor. While they attempted to open the safe in the manager's office, she surreptitiously placed a cell call to the police station, which is only about 100 meters away. When the police arrived, a 45-minute shootout ensued, during which the police shot and killed two of the assailants. The police eventually teargassed the building, and when the remaining two attempted to slip out by mingling with the staff as they left, they were attacked by a large, very angry, machete-carrying mob that had gathered on the scene, and hacked into mincemeat. I really have no sympathy for the bastards, but Jesus, they died horrible, horrible deaths. When I eventually reached the store after visiting the staff at the hospital, the police were still hosing away blood and fragments of flesh.
After seeing the three injured employees being treated, I arranged for the others, who were badly traumatized, to have a counseling session, and it was heartbreaking to hear them describe the ordeal of lying on the floor for 45 minutes while a firefight raged around them. The were showered with broken glass, lying in blood, having to look at the bodies of the two dead gunmen, one of whom had had his face shot away. They didn't believe that they were going to survive. While one of the group was recounting the events to the psychologist, he started sweating profusely, I mean veritable rivers running off his face and arms, and complained suddenly that he couldn't see. He didn't respond to hands being waved in front of his face, and the psychologist assured him that he'd seen this happen before as a result of extreme stress, and that his vision would return in a few minutes. I honestly don't know if he was just spinning a line of bullshit to calm down the guy, but sure enough, his vision returned in about five minutes. Clearly he hadn't suffered any physical injury apart from some cuts and bruises, but I can only surmise that the extreme psychological stress had screwed with his brain somehow. Can anyone shed any light as to the mechanism that could have caused this?
I'm an insensitive clod you insensitive clods!!
Why did they mod this offtopic? I was voting, I saw Bushes name on the ballot, got so enraged, I went blind temporarily and ended up voting for no one.
I understand what you mean. Recently I picked up the game Full Spectrum Warrior and it described what is called 'the fog of war' in the training levels. They used the term 'situational awareness' to define it too. They basically said that in a combat situation, you won't be able to notice things not in your immediate field of vision and to rely on others in the fire team to watch those areas.
Am I the only one who read that as "strong emoticons may cause temporary blindness"??
TIAEAE!
Great work guys. However, I propose a new test, in the interest of science of course, with erotic images!
It's a bloody hand you sicko.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Hypnotists have known this for many years. Anyone should know that any type of strong sudden emotional response or startle gives you that reflex reaction that induces you for a fraction of a second. Having a sudden strong emotional reaction is going to startle you. Thus this type of thing is the basis of an instant inducton.
In set C I can't see the rotated image. Is my visual neural net in need of an upgrade? I thought I was young...:(.
Would be nice if they included a little button to go through the images slowly so I can feel sorry for myself.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
you're a replicant
How's that Beethoven 9th coming along?
i can't be bothered to check if this has been posted before since I'm too busy slacking off from fixing my office machines from the Zotob worm....
This theory sounds bogus to me. If this were true, wouldn't the playboy pictorial dissapear at the peak of the masturbation process? In which case, you wouldn't be able to "complete" - and spin into this infinite loop, of reaching climax point, but never achieving it because you went "temporarily blind" - and then trying all over again.
Just a thought.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Why is this flamebait? This is actually quite funny and on topic.
So it's flamebait!
People that have studied to any significant degree people's responses during life-threatening situations know that visual and auditory perception is shot to hell: you get tunnel vision and you often "black out".
Hell, anyone that's had sex knows that your situational awareness goes to hell outside the smalle confine of the act itself.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Is this temporary blindess business actually NEWS to anyone ? Personally I'm not surprised in the LEAST by a fraction of a second, because often time I can go as long as 1 hour with no awareness whatsoever what has passed through my field of vision during that time. This happens quite often when I 'zone out' on what seems to be a really good idea --- perhaps I'll have a DVD playing when it comes. Then the next thing I'll notice is the ending credits are scolling by. When I rewind the DVD to re-watch the entirely missed 2nd half of the movie, I will realize that not a SINGLE scene in the entire hour has left an impression on my visual memory -- so I was really and truly blind for that period.
Slightly off topic - read the adblock listing for the first link... they have 'popupunder' and 'antipopup' testing. (even says it in the dns of the link)
Did any other firefox users get a zedo.com popup? I hit adblock, and blocked about 20 large swathes of abc advertising.
You know, if they hadn't hijacked my computer and opened a window without my consent, then I wouldn't have had to. 0.0.0.0 zedo.com also.
pain in the ass bitches.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I'll dumb it down a bit so most of you can understand what he/she just posted:
Viewing shocking images causes higher stimulation and "thought". IE: Your mind starts THINKING about what you just saw. It becomes PREOCCUPIED. That's why it causes problems processing subsequent imagery.
It's not true "blindness". It's more like day-dreaming.
And I'd like to add that I believe anxiety is the basic catalyst here.
The control sequence was much, much slower.
Seems to me the problem this test proces is that in arbitrary images displayed at 1/10th of a second are virtually impossible to process in the first place, regardless of some infinitessimal "trauma" associated with the image.
To be on the safe side I stick with :) :)) at most :)))))
or
I hate it when someone does a
on me.
Oh shppt Icamt swe
It's called a DISTRACTION. Honestly all they've done here is prove the people can get distracted, and that if the situation is emmotive the person is likely to pay more attention and get more distracted. ie. Sex and violence gets our attention.
What next? A study to prove the smell of food can make you hungry? A study to prove that being shot in the head can be harmful to your health? A study to prove that sunshine makes you feel warm?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I had trouble finding my car after my boss announced "you're fired!"
The usage of the term "blindness" has a long tradition in research on visual attention. Just google for "change blindness" or "inattentional blindness" and you will see what I mean... ^^
that masturbation while watching porn makes you blind.
I agree with you. No matter how many times I watched them, I never glimpsed the friggen sideways building in series C. The images just flew by way too fast for my brain to process what most of them were pictures of, never mind picking out which one is oriented incorrectly.
I mean, seriously, with a picture of flowers or something, if I only see it for 1/10th of a second, how do I know if they're at a 90 degree angle? Half of this test is my own brain playing tricks on me trying to guess what was rotated at a 90 degree angle.
Of course it's always possible I'm just stupid, let's not discount that. I hear these psychological tricks don't work on stupid people.
...how many kittens died during these experiments?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Marcy D'Arcy: "Steve, I just came here to show you what you'll never have again" [rips open her coat]
Marcy D'Arcy: "Read 'em and weep!"
Al Bundy: "I, I'm blind! Help me, Peg! I can't see!"
Steve D'Arcy: "Oh, yeah? Two can play at that game!" [rips open his shirt]
Peggy Bundy: "Now, I'm blind too!"
- Married with Children
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Sounds to me as if there's already a precise term with both correct denotation and connotation, namely "tunnel vision".
Masturbating DOES cause blindness...
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
On the third one I just saw:
skyline
skyline
bright yellow fire hydrant
skyline
skyline
village
skyline
skyline
skyline
At the top picture I notice the bright red car first and the gun second.
I absolutely agree with you that it's stupid and way too early to say "We tested with violent images so the people that zoomed in on the violent images are worriers."
It would be interesting to replace the violent images with anything recognizable. For example, they could use pictures of Sadam Hussein, the Statue of Liberty or Mickey Mouse.
Of course, this is related to doing a double take so violence and nudity do stand out. How it all fits in with being care free is harder to say.
The third sequence is a control where the gory picture is replaced by a firehydrent and the picture is easier to spot. Comone wakeup...
you people realize that the "target" image has nothing to do with the study ? The Question is: Can you see the gun? The first image ( the bloody hand ) is quite violent and how hard I tried wasn't able to see the gun.
*an infinite number of monkeys wrote this sig
"But officer...!"
"But professor...!"
"But honey...!"
25 July: At 1030 BST Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Ian Blair apologises to Mr de Menezes' family but says there will be no change to the police's "shoot-to-kill" policy.
/me strikes Britain off the list of "to visit" places. :(
I remember reading stories told by proud Brits about how their "Bobbies" didn't even carry a gun and the criminals respected that by not using guns either. But nowadays the British police apparently has a "shoot-to-kill" policy. I think even in the US (which struggles to become a police state ASAP) you may be detained, searched, ridiculed, but generally not shot-to-kill just because you look like a potential terrorists.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
After reading a bit about the British "shot-to-kill" policy, I am disgusted. This is the worst thing that a supposedly civilized country has ever done in recent years. This is so horrible, I don't have words to explain how horrible it is. The people responsible for this policy are not even people, they are dangerous and violent inhumane animals who are much worse than the terorrists.
To have a policy of killing suspects on the spot just because you suspect they might be terrorists is so horrible, it dwarfs the untold horrors of Abu-Ghraib and even the terrorist bombings themselves.
P.S. Advice to Arabs and other suspicious elements living in London - don't leave home or use a cab.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Any abrubt change in the visual field can have the same effect. It's well known in video compression that you can compress frames after a cut more heavily because people don't attend to them so well - they're not tuned in. What's even more interesting is that you can also compress frames more heavily *before* the cut, because the brain makes sense of what happens at one time by what happens after, as well as before. Flashing up shocking images can have an effect, just because they're flashed up, and not just because of their content.
obsolete before invention. goddammit.
So, who else immediately thought of Zaphod's peril-sensitive sunglasses?
Calling it "blindness" implys that there's some kind of physiological defect, which is inaccurate. "Distraction" would be closer to what's actually going on here.
Isn't it what happenened to the whole US people after 9/11? They just couldn't see what was obvious to the rest of the world. It's been a looooooooooooooooong split second though.
i guess computer geeks are never blind. wrong thread on /.
Could this effect explain the serial criminal's fixation on violent and/or erotic imagery of various taboo varieties. The blindness induced by a momentary image in a saccading mind would be magnified in a fixated sort of mind which holds onto such images for long periods. The whole Marquis de Sade thing is predicated on the ritual use of emotionally affective ... devices ... to transcend the primary senses.
It would seem to point to a quality of selective attention, that when we attend to internal echoing imagery we are blind to our external senses, and we may get lost in dreams for long periods... days or months.
.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I think it might be a tree that's sideways; the problem is that with the pictures going by so quickly, it's hard to tell anything that's going on. I could have mistaken a branch for a tree, rotated. You are absolutely correct that a rotated picture is insufficiently different to be certain you saw it. A cartoon character (because all the rest are photos) would have been far better.
And that, for me, is the real interest of the piece. If you didn't know which of A, B and C had the bloody hand in them, you'd certainly be able to say afterwards. But you'd be hard-pressed to remember or describe the other slides so clearly, they went by so quickly. (You might waffle about trees and suchlike, but you'd never be very precise or certain.)
I'd like to see a study on which images in a set of perfectly innocuous ones people remember the best; then demonstrate that people remember the gory/erotic ones better when present. Do the same for "very different" pictures, like a cartoon character in a sequence of celebrity photos. The problem with soft sciences is they seem frequently to run before they've even thought about the legs they're running on.
At the other end of the concern scale, I think that someone is playing fast-and-loose with their figures here. Checking the figures at the end of the animation, people detect the rotated picture 91% of the time (A), 86% (C) and fail to detect 30% of the time (B). So in other words, the failure rate goes from 14% when there's no shock image, to 9% when there is but it's distant in time and then 30% when the shock image is close in time. Do we deduce that a shock image overloads the input briefly and then sets the brain working extra-hard, or what? This is certainly an interesting result, but if the rest of their figures are like this (and one would expect the example to be one of the more extreme ones) then someone is claiming far more for these results than I think they show. My bet's on the journalist; I've never yet read a science journalist I can trust.
For the record, I'm no psychologist, merely a humble mathematical-physicist-in-training.
I have this in perspective and thanks for the reply. I do not imply that this policy is worse in terms of actual human lives lost due to it, but it's worse (to me) in terms of its sheer irrationality and inhumanity. When a violent US thug tortures children in a prison, this is bad, but this isn't irrational or unexpected. When a stupid illogical Arab blows up people because of lies that he believes, this is completely understandable.
But when the police shoots people on the whim, just because they thought for a second that there might kind of be a terrorist around there somewhere, this is horribly wrong. Police. In Britain. Randomly killing people. In the name of safety. The very absurdity of the situation is the most horrible thing here. This is right in the same book as "Destroing the village was the only way to protect it" reports from the Vietnam War.
I do not oppose accidentally killing an innocent during an anti-terrorist operation, where lives of tens of people clearly hang in the balance. Where the whole operation is carefully orchestrated and 30 seconds of a delay can distrupt it unrepairably. Yes, if you are storming a building with a dozen of armed terrorists inside, you can justifiably cause some "collateral damage". But if you just pick a random person on the street, decide that he looks like a terrorist and shoot him in the head, this is unjust, this is inhuman and this is never justified. Look at Israel. They live under a constant threat of terrorist attacks (though suicide bombers are a relatively recent development), but they do not kill random civilians just because they might be terrorists. And this is despite the fact that there are soldiers armed with machine guns, not just undercover cops.
Might it be because good guys (Jews) generally look so much like the bad guys (Arabs) there? Are British cops just racists? Whatever the reason for the irrational hateful crime that they committed, this cannot be forgiven.
P.S. Sorry for the offtopic, with so many windows open and with such a short attention span it's inevitable that mistakes are made. I am not a policeman and I don't carry a gun, so I guess can be forgiven, though.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
That's the point - it's NOT randomly killing people. Nowhere in the policy does it say anything remotely like 'if you see someone you don't like the look of, shoot them dead.' It remains the case that this happens when people are being surveilled, under suspicion, with paper trails and proper intelligence; it can understandably be extended to if a policeman is confronted by someone who yells "I have a bomb and I'm about to blow up the station", if that could ever be expected to happen. There is no mention of shooting to kill on a whim.
I saw after my reply that you had posted your own replies to your posts as offtopic, and appreciate that it's a mistake - my own apologies for getting onto you about it, since your intended parent post was collapsed in my view.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
What about those of us who are not vidiots?
Last FPS I played was "The Bilestoad".
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
A similar study has won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2004:
http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html
PSYCHOLOGY
Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.
REFERENCE: "Gorillas in Our Midst," Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74. DEMO: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/ig.html
Before I read it I thought it was phsyical blindness, but all the article is describing is situational awareness or merely distractions. It's like saying talking on a cell while driving a car can cause blindness.
did you forget to take your meds?
I worry about you...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Thought TV makes you an idiot but now blinds you too !! oh well !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
This probably has something to NLP. In NLP when a stimuli occurs there is about a half second window in which an anchor can be set. Anchors can usually be set immediately after something "shocking" occurs.
Then again...I have no credentials in the Psych community....just a randomn thought.
Masturbating really does make you blind, so long as you do it to porn!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
There's no sideways building, the rotated pictures are trees. You can see them here in detail: http://users.pandora.be/tomenmieke/rub_index/
I also think it doesn't have much to do with being emotional about the picture. You just see something out of the ordinary and try to reflect on it, mostly because it's something 'rare'. It's just like passing by cars and shops. You usually see them, but don't really look at them. Just when there's something extra-ordinary about them, you look again. In this case, you don't often see 'images of injury and dismemberment' (I hope) which draws your attention. At the same time, I didn't really look at the other pictures either, just trying to find a clue if they're rotated or not (mostly checking horizon/sky). If I were asked to try to remember details about the rotated picture, I would probably miss some of the pictures following the rotated one as well.
Couldn't this be caused by people blinking in response to the images?
I guess the only way to test is to tell someone his mother died, flash an image, and then ask him to fill out a survey. I suppose tell him he was part of an elaborate test, as well.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
I think I saw that in a Kung Fu movie...
You could just as easily say that gory or erotic images can be more easily remembered and processed than neutral images. When I took the flash test, I could see the gory hand pretty clearly (white skin, red blood, coming from the left side of the frame), even at 1/10th of a second, but I couldn't tell you at all what was in any of the other images other than vague nature scenes.
Seems to me that what they've discovered is that the human brain assigns a higher importance to gory images. I think a more interesting study would be the reverse: can you pick out a neutral scene out of a bunch of gory/erotic photos? At what point does the gory/erotic 'saturation' happen, and it all becomes less important?
steampunk web design
I've grown up and matured and it's not much of a problem anymore, but when I was a young man I would go deaf while under stress. For example, back in college if I were particularly nervous about approaching a girl but forced myself to go ahead, anyway, I would nearly always experience a reduction in the ambient noise level and then the sound of her voice until, finally, I could sort of hear my own voice off in the distance but nothing else. It didn't matter how noisy the party was, I basically heard nothing until I managed to say something sufficiently stupid or off-the-wall (it's really hard to carry on a conversation if you can't hear the other person) that the girl got disgusted and walked away. With the stress removed, my hearing would quickly return.
Anyone else ever experience this?
Are you telling me that human beings pay attention to some things and ignore other things? Holy crap! That's brilliant. Obviously said author just started noticing this. jezzz.
This is the same idea as stress induced "tunnel vision", well known to soldiers, cops and hunters. Hunters know it as "buck fever".
Example being the cop focusing on an armed goblin trying to shoot him will often miss other important things, like the old lady standing behind the bad guy, or another bad guy shooting at him.
This appears to be a normal human trait, not a defect. Part of the fight/flight response suite. A tight focus on the enemy is probably one of those evolutionary advantages we got from the dinosaurs.
Good news is tunnel vision can be conquered with a combination of training and experience. Bad news is, cops don't usually get that training. The recent shooting of the Brazillian man in the London subway may in fact be a case of combat induced tunnel vision.
As usual the psych weenies are like 30 years behind the curve. That's what you get when you ignore whole realms of knowledge beacause they are politically incorrect. As the parent noted, Air Force people have known about this since the Korean War.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/16/emotion_in duced_blindness/
Just calling it what it is.
Just like gaming on a PC with insufficient resources available. frames get dropped, in order to keep things moving.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Well, in my book if by following your policy to the letter you kill a random person and noone argues that the policy is somehow unclear or complicated, then this policy in a sense justifies randomly killing people.
The fact that all this happens with paper trail doesn't mean anything. I heard the paper trail in Auschwitz was top notch as well. What matters is reality - the actual facts. And the facts (judging from information available) are that a policeman has authority to decide that the person should be killed, even when a reasonable person, when faced with the same evidence is unlikely to call the evidence "clear cut".
A person who looks like a terrorist to a policeman (who presumably only saw the "suspect" from afar or on a camera) can be killed. There was no evidence that a bomb is present and even the police doesn't claim that there was such evidence. The only justification was that "he looked like the guy who might have attempted to explode a bomb elsewhere". This isn't a case where such a murder would have been justified. This isn't a situation where police had either proper intelligence or surveillance. Jean Charles didn't yell "I have a bomb". Noone yelled "He has a bomb". He didn't look like he had a bomb. The only way to describe is "I think he looks like a terrorist. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! He looks like a dead terrorist now."
This is wrong. This is just wrong on so many levels, I don't realise why the head of Scotland Yard hasn't resigned already. This is horribly wrong. Even Hestapo would never work that sloppily and with such disrespect for human life. They would at least confirm first that you are a Jew and not a Brazilian and then kill you.
Even the terrorists have some respect for human life, although they feel that they have a justification to take it. The policemen who murdered Jean Charles had no respect for life whatsoever. And for the animal who was responsible for the shoot-to-kill policy I have no words. He is the one who doesn't deserve to live and I hope he dies a brutal and horrible death.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
That is the appropriate name for this phenomenon, and it is well researched already.
Generalizing it to an emotion inducing event is pretty common sense stuff.
I took the flash test - I couldnt clearly identify anything on any of the sequences - they went by too fast! The results may be indicative of the colors or a host of other factors, not the fact that an image that someone couldn't even make out was violent or not.
Never liked the "break a leg" phrase, either. Also, the common refrain "die you *&&#*$ #(#($)_#" gets old after a while...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
This is the same principe that allows mp3s to compress so highly. For *any* evnt that goes trough our senses, a high level of excitation will make following low levels so irrelevant that you can't recognize it. So this is nothing new. It's just a simple neuronal "effect", like the effect that you remember more importantthings better. But one could even extend it to the fact that *negative* things will be remembered better than positives ones with the same level. But i definitely count sexual images as positive! ;)
If you do not, then you have to face it: you don't like/do sex, you will become extinct. (but don't tell it to those christian extremists ;))
I guess there will be much more uses for this effect in the future.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Well, isn't this just something. Who needs peril sensitive sunglasses when you can have a peril sensitive nervous system?
I would like to see the test done again, but instead of a complicated image, like a sideways building, why not use a large black arrow on a white background.
Most of the work on this sort of phenomenon has used stimuli much like those you describe - search for the term "attentional blink". I haven't read the article yet, but I assume theit main point was to demonstrate that this effect, usually observed with very simple stimuli like letters, also occurs with more complex images, and is therefore vaguely relevant to life outside a psychology lab.
Reminds me of a flurry of adverts which made the rounds a couple of years back; where highly stressful social situations were depicted, (a family arguing over their teen daughter's announced pregnancy, a couple in a strained relationship having an argument, etc.), followed immediately by a product placement. Icky and not very cleverly disguised, but then most of the audience didn't understand what was being attempted.
The moral of the story: Never trust a Coca-Cola product or company. --Any corporation willing to play creepy mind games to sell their product should be denied existence.
-FL
Thank you. I was wondering whether I was crazy.
She was right all along when she told me "masturbatng can make you blind!"
Who the hell won that thing?
:D
That has to have been the worst excess of the late 90s on this site
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If I abandon all emotion?
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
TRAUMA is very interesting topic.
I would encourage you to get educated about
projects like mk-ultra, monarch, sar (satanic ritual abuse).
http://educate-yourself.org/mc/
http://www.trance-formation.com/aboutcathy.htm
http://www.savethemales.ca/000683.html
http://www.suite101.com/articles.cfm/ritual_abuse
This may be the most important subject to read about today...
The goggles, they do nothing!
The bloody hand image does stick out compared to the other images. However, isn't it the only image in the sequence with bright red color in it? It could just be the color contrast that makes it stick out more.
She wrote extensively about memory modification and memory loss
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Whenever I make a bad hit I just go blind (with rage?) and have no clue whatsoever to where the ball went. Golf will never be a relaxing recreation for me :(
This type of temporary blindness is an illusion. There is really no loss of sight functions in the eye, it is all in the brain. Our conciousness shifts to a different scene blocking out what the eye is "seeing". Seeing is a combination of the eye and the brain. If either is impared one doesn't see. People also experience this when dreaming. If, during a dream, one snores or swallows, the dream is interupted for a 1/2 sec. or so, shifting the conciousness from the dream to the body and back again. We only have one conciousness. It can shift to different things very quickly and give us a "multitasking" effect.In the case of watching TV and not "seeing" someone enter the room, The emotional shock of the story on the TV shifts our brain to memories that remind us of the terror on the TV, thus shifting out conciousness from the eye to the brain memory and blocking momentarily the eye data input.
If the flash demonstration is representative of their experiment, it is just ridiculous.
I tried the tests. In test A, I vaguely noticed something that might be sideways, a tree or something, but I wasn't sure. In test B I didn't notice anything that I could be at all sure was sideways. In test C however the lighthouse jumped out at me like a sore thumb and was obviously sideways.
So, I decided to figure out what was going on. I took screenshots while running the tests repeatedly until I got lucky and got a screenshot of one sideways image from each test. Guess what. The target image is different in each test, even though the static picture below claims that it is a lighthouse in each test. How the heck are you supposed to compare the results then?
The test A, the sideways image is a tree in what looks like desert-like terrain, with roughly an irregularly shaped 30% of the frame filled by sky. It is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. In test B, the target image is a picture of a bunch of trees against a misty mountain, rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. In test C, the target image is a lighthouse on flat ground, rotated 90 degrees clockwise. A sideways lighthouse is obviously going to be easier to pick out, being linear in form... whereas trees are more organic, lacking in orthogonal lines.
So either the whole study was unscientific and the results meaningless, or this is a flash demonstration SNAFU and unrepresentative of the study.