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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?
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.
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.
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?