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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.
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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.
Wanking DOES cause blindness.
It all makes sense now. I was wondering why I could never find the mouse after reading VB code.
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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!
Porn does make you blind! Hell, look at the name of the effect: "attentional rubbernecking."
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.
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.
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
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.
``Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Blind with rage'''
Or rather, it confirms that these expressions actually come from somewhere. Many of the folk wisdows contained in various expressions turn out to contain at least a grain of truth once scientific research catches up with them.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I saw my mom having sex once, I never saw the same after that. Is that the same thing?
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.
If you want to make the effect comprehensible to Joe Sixpack,....
Yes, but they also use the term in their peer reviewed paper in addition to the popular press articles.
"Hysterical blindness" is an accepted term for a condition...
Situational awareness.
And how about those poor "stripe-blind" kittens that were reared with nothing but strong vertical or horizontal lines...
That is a form of "cortical blindness" that is real and has to do with developmental defects in the visual pathways.
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.
$100 says it is the latter and if I were reviewing this paper, I would suggest just that experiment prior to acceptance for publication.
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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!
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.
Paying attention to something :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It's kind of like how people like to use "stealing" to describe copyright infringement -- they're superficially similar, but not synonymous.
Generally, things should be referred to by the term that accurately describes them. Why else would we have different words to describe different things?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
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
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?
The classic demonstration of low level versus high level functionality has to do with something called a "true cortical blindness". In these cases, trauma or stroke (whatever) that damages occipital cortex may in some rare cases render a person functionally blind. However, when you throw a ball at them, strangely, they are able to catch it. Obviously there is some visual function related to vision taking place. What is happening here is that the tectum or visual centers in the brainstem whose functionality is orienting to place and timing are perfectly intact. However, visual centers related to conscious perception of what is being seen are damaged. All other visual pathways are intact.
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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?
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,
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
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