Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Find Believing Can Be Seeing
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Scientists at University College London have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw revealing that the context surrounding what we see is all important — sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren't really there. A vague background context is more influential and helps us to fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context. This may explain why we are prone to 'see' imaginary shapes in the shadows when the light is poor. "Illusionists have been alive to this phenomenon for years," said Professor Zhaoping. "When you see them throw a ball into the air, followed by a second ball, and then a third ball which 'magically' disappears, you wonder how they did it. In truth, there's often no third ball — it's just our brain being deceived by the context, telling us that we really did see three balls launched into the air, one after the other." The original research paper is available on PLOS, the open-access, peer-reviewed journal."
Is this actually news?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
When you're out driving, you have to be more aware of the possible dangers that you will be facing, like cyclists and motorcyclists. A lot of people don't see them coming at junctions because they're just looking out for cars on the road..
which is totally what she said
Link in parent is malicious. Do not click.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
... is the direct translation of a dutch expression. Also encountered as "First see it, only then believe it."
But apparently we (the dutch) are completely wrong.
-- Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
As the summary noted, this is something that people have known about for a very long time. More specifically, this same subject was being discussed on the same website almost eight years ago.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
All of the police officer shootings where the victim had a remote or other non-nefarious object in their hands. It is quite possible that the officer had a mindset to the effect that, hey this guy probably has a gun, and his or her mind see's what they wanted to see.
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit
He took the midnight train goin anywhere
A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on
Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding, somewhere in the night
Working hard to get my fill,
Everybody wants a thrill
Payin anything to roll the dice,
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on
Dont stop believin
Hold on to the feelin
Streetlight people
Who can go on seein
'Cuz they be believin
I don't understand people who "see things" where nothing exists. Like the Face on Mars. Okay yes it kinda, sorta looks like a face. HOWEVER it also looks like a bunch of rocks, which is what it is (later images confirm this).
People need to learn to Question what they see,
rather than just blindly believe.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
This post is not here...
"Alive to this phenomenon" is precisely how an illusionist would want you to perceive the effects of their knowing how something really was. What a perfect idiom.
--
make install -not war
because this is about the only thing which explains my friend and his girlfriends belief in Ghosthunters and such...
I always looked at things this article covers along the lines of we make a decision and justify it later, not the reverse.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I can't believe that someone actually wrote a story that claims that dinosaurs floated around like Vincent Price! Oh wait...
It's how the cortex works. If an input is difficult to resolve, higher cortical regions may simply assign it to a category. Lower portions of the cortex are then informed of what they're supposedly seeing, and adjust their operation to more closely fit in an effort to help clear up the image, reinforcing the previous mislabeling. Like other machine learning techniques, this "machine" can give false positives when given poor data. People can't help seeing things where things are not, but like you say, they should learn to question their senses when they produce unusual data.
The Buddhist Monks have known this for a very very long time.
Well, here's an example. Suppose some guy picks up various scattered bits of facts -- a story on slashdot here, something about Mars kooks there. Now, he has an instinct -- or maybe it's hardwired at an even lower level than that -- to make up patterns around those scattered facts, to fill in the blanks. So he imagines a category of people who 'see things where nothing exists'. Before long, he's convinced enough of this specific phenomenon -- of this entity which is purely a product of his own tendency to create patterns to explain the phenomena he senses -- that he actually starts posting about this group of people on slashdot, as if there actually were one specific kind of person who has this trait!
And then other factors, psychological, move him to assume that he's 'better' than this entity that has popped up in his mind and that he now believes is an actual thing. He even begins to give patronising advice. To him, it's just as if he's *interacting* with this thing, this 'people who see things where nothing exists'. His self-deception is complete!
Far fetched? Maybe. But maybe not...
HTH
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
18 observers is enough? Not that I necessarily disagree with the results they've gathered in this study, but the sample group seems awfully small....
.sigs are for post^Hers.
That's more about optical illusions and imagination - the summary talks about thinking you saw a ball when in fact there was none, which is a bit different. IMO it helps to explain why people's memories can be modified so easily by suggestion, and as I said above, why so many people don't actually see motorcyclists coming as they check a junction before they move onto a new road. This is more about situations where you're not actually questioning what you see, because you're not really expecting any funny business, so you can easily be misled, especially in situations where there is a lot going on around you, so your brain filters out certain information because it is limiting its scope to what it has been trained to consider the 'important' information.
which is totally what she said
I'm nott drunk you sssheee, you arrre sssjust believing thisssh massshine is telling you vhat, i can ssshee it'ssh sshays I passsshhhhhed!
The summary says scientists have found the link, but the reality is more like they have proven the link. As TFS itself says, Illusionists have been alive to this phenomenon for years.
The most important thing one learns in art school is how to see. By this I mean that non-artists see like non-mathemeticians calculate.
Now I have to go and read the research paper.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The human mind sees what it wants to see while sober, and this tendency becomes even worse after a few drinks. That's why one should never look for a relationship while wearing beer goggles. It's hard enough to see through a woman's bullshit without booze clouding your judgment.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
"Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" - Chico Marx dressed up as Groucho in "Duck Soup" (context information serves as anti-pedantry device).
I write sci-fi for metalheads
What the article doesn't say is that this phenomenon increases in middle age, both with respect to seeing and hearing. I'm not sure how much is due to actual declines in visual and auditory acuity; I'm inclined to think it's a cognitive effect, like common memory loss.
I've always supposed Lewis Carroll's poem, from _Sylvie and Bruno,_ was referring to this effect. Certainly "He thought he saw... he looked again and found it was..." is happening to me more frequently.
He thought he saw an Elephant,
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realise," he said,
"The bitterness of Life!"
He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister's Husband's Niece.
"Unless you leave this house," he said,
"I'll send for the Police!"
He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
"The one thing I regret," he said,
"Is that it cannot speak!"
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
"If this should stay to dine," he said,
"There won't be much for us!"
He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee-mill:
He looked again, and found it was
A Vegetable-Pill.
"Were I to swallow this," he said,
"I should be very ill!"
He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.
"Poor thing," he said, "poor silly thing!
It's waiting to be fed!"
He thought he saw an Albatross
That fluttered round the lamp:
He looked again, and found it was
A Penny-Postage Stamp.
"You'd best be getting home," he said:
"The nights are very damp!"
He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
"And all its mystery," he said,
"Is clear as day to me!"
He thought he saw a Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
"A fact so dread," he faintly said,
"Extinguishes all hope!"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Incidentally, I seem to recall that Mary predicted the end of the world by the end of the century during her brief stay in Conyers (using the redneck who owned the house with the bush as an intermediary). Luckily for us, as with many flightly women, she must have changed her mind.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I tried to RTFA but the link wasn't really there.
that's pseudo scientists being paid for telling everybody what everybody already knows. Shame
However, they are still looking for an explanation of the fact that people closest to GWB are the most affected. Normal vision often appears to be restored soon after they are removed from his office.
having all police routinely armed is a bad idea.
I think it was William James, appx. 100 years ago, who said "If you believe something to be true, it will be true in its consequences." If you believe you see something, you will see it. It won't be there in reality, but you'll see it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
There is a branch of philosophy called idealism which is pretty out there, it seems a bit crazy at first, but it deserves more respect than one gets from an initial glance.
All our experiences come from our senses, our eyes/ears/nose/skin/tongue send electrical impulses to our brain, the mind interpreters these groups of sensory experiences and we call it reality.
Idealism says (as best i can describe) that "reality" is the mind's interpretation of these sensory experiences, what causes our senses to send a particular sensory experience to the brain isnt directly knowable, therefore not as relevant as the experience itself.
It is the sensory experience itself that defines reality, i.e. reality is the effect not the cause.
The Wikipedia page doesnt do the topic justice.
I think this phenomenon is often referred to as religion.
Seeing something that isn't there remind me of fans of Obama!
I see dead people.
the scientists are seeing the results they want to see, and not what the results actually are. That would both invalidate, and validate their claims.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Something like this happened to me. Reading an article about how Trader Vic was about to donate a sculpture of Smiledon to UC Berkeley, before I got to the part where it was to be displayed, my brain decided it was going to be placed outside of the Life Sciences building, so my conscious mind read 'life sciences building'. However, when I turned to my roommate to tell him about this, my mouth said it was going to the 'Earth Sciences' building! This caught me by surprise, so I went back to the article and, sure enough, it said 'Earth Sciences building'!
This concept is often useful to play off of with an opponent. A strike is much more potent if the opponent doesn't see me wind up, clench my shoulder, or hear my sharp intake of breath... all of the clues that typically accompany a strike. When I strike someone in this "casual" manner, it's incredible how often they don't see my fist coming right at their face... even when we're training at slow speeds for safety. This also gives strikes the illusion of being much more powerful than they really are, due to the surprise. The human body instinctively prepares for the shock when it becomes aware of all these context clues preceding the strike.
This is also interesting to experience as a martial artist. In one instance, I clearly saw a staff being swung at my face (), but the way the person was swinging it (one aspect of this was they they didn't appear to be paying attention to me), for some reason my brain didn't register any danger... so I didn't move away, and... CLUNK.
People believe Volta invented the electric battery, but someone in Baghdad had one thousands of years ago.
In science it's not important if some native already knew about a datum, what counts is who shared this information with the scientific community. Magicians are hermetic about the secrets they know, scientists have to figure them out on their own, since those quick-fingered showmen just won't share.
You can't take the sky from me...
Discworld's Death (also called Bob) always new it ... that's why only cats, children & wizards could see him but not the common folks.
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
But no real message. So every different group thinks he will work to their advantage, because he hasn't comitted to doing anything. He's pro-gun and anti-gun. He's pro-abortion and contra-abortion. He's ...
Vague context "change" (ie forcing all those other bastards to agree with me) without filling in the blanks that would burst the bubble surrounding him.
For the sake of my own personal/professional bias, I'm glad to see /. focusing attention on more cognitive/human performance stories. However, these expectancy effects on sensory perception have been known for almost half a century by the terms "efference copy" or "corollary discharge." My personal favorite is the scientist who COMPLETELY paralyzed himself with tetrototoxin and found that when he tried to move his eyes, it he "saw" the room move accordingly (even though his eyes never moved a tick; see Matin et al. 1982).
The only thing really new in this paper is that they show that these expectations are integrated in a statistically-optimal (read "Bayes-optimal") way.
"Reality is self-induced hallucination." oh10101
... sane/leaders.
... I will never forgive and will always view the megalomaniacs as evil.
Reality is hallucination, and all dogmatic interpretations are self-induced ID/Id facts.
Well, it still summarizes the same, I guess.
Also, if everyone is crazy, then sanity is a collective/communal self-induced ID/Id fact.
Mass/Community hysteria could be the flawed-reasoning for considering GWBush, Hitler, Caesar, Napoleon
IOW: Everyone was fucking nuts at the time. If I were a good Christian, then I would
forgive the murdering bastards for not knowing what they do (due to insanity).
Well not being a a crazy dogmatist
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
"Professor Zhaoping" is Li Zhaoping, and being Chinese, her family name (last name) is Li, NOT Zhaoping (her given, first name). Silly editors, etc. its like going around and calling her Professor Bob or Professor Susie...
I read this item right after reading "Microsoft Pulls Vista SP1 Update" and it made me wonder... did they every really launch it?
Once a dog gets friendly playing a game of fetch with you, sometimes they don't let go of the ball to try and mess with you. That is when you start playing mind games with the dog. Often dogs will start running as soon as they see your arm swing. So just hold onto the ball, and they'll go running then get confused that they can't find the ball. Show them the ball, and they'll figure it out. Do it enough times so they don't go running when you swing you arm. Next, throw the ball regularly. If the dog brings it back. Do another fake throw to see if the dog is paying attention to the release. Next, throw the ball over the dog, but hit a building so the ball comes back to you. The dog will spend a long time looking for the ball because it saw you release it, but didn't figure out that the ball hit the wall.
We have a dog now, but it only plays fetch with rocks and bricks. I once made the mistake of throwing a rock almost straight up in the air, and it caught the stone with its teeth. Ouch.
God spoke to me.
Not the naked lady on the clamshell, but the planet.
I was __AMAZED__ when I first heard this, but you can see Venus in the daytime with the naked eye. If, tht is, your brain lets you.
First, you need to figure out where Venus is. If Venus is in it's "Evening Star" mode (i.e., if you can see it just after sunset) then you can use your hand at arms length to measure roughly how far behind the sun it is : say 3 hands. Or, you could be a geek and just look it up using some kind of astronomy software or a web search. The point is, you need to be able to predict more or less where Venus will be in the daytime sky.
The next day, when the sun is still up, you can direct your gaze at that particular patch of blue sky; e.g., 3 hands behind (i.e., East) of the sun. What you will see is a patch of blue sky with absolutely nothing in it. That's because the context (empty blue sky) is reinforced by your brain - it filters out the fact that there are actually non-uniformities in the signals from your retina. Otherwise, the world would look much more like static on a TV screen. Anyway, keep looking. It helps if you don't stare intently at a specific fixed point, but rather let your gaze go kind of soft, letting your peripheral vision operate. If you are looking at the right patch of sky, and if you're patient, some kind of threshold is reached and Venus will suddenly "pop out" and be clearly visible. Once your brain (the low-level filtering part of your visual system) decides that thre really _is_ something there, then it reinforces the perception rather than suppressing it. You can stare at the planet and see it plain as day. If you look away even for an instant, Venus will be "gone" and you'll probably have to wait a bit for it to pop out at you again.
I've done this with binoculars, and it works the same way. It's a bit more difficult to find the planet, but once it "pops out" at you its easier to stay on it. I'd start with the naked eye.
Anyway, doing this little experiment takes a little preparation (figuring out where Venus is) and does take some effort and patience, but when it works its very impressive, much more impressive (IMO) than some lame optical illusion on paper that you've probably already seen a hundred times.
Good luck, and don't let the neighbors see you.
When I was young, probably ~10, I was in bed and looked at a shoe on the floor, but for some reason I didn't see it as a shoe and for a few long seconds I could not tell what is was at all. Then all the sudden it "came into focus", so to speak, as a shoe and it was obviously a shoe, plain as day. I came to the conclusion that if something is viewed "out of context" (even though my shoe really wasn't) it can have a great impact on how you see or recognize it. Guess I should have published that finding 30 years ago.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
This phenomenon was explained years ago as an SEP field. It was described as the cheaper and more practical alternative to an invisibility field. I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned it.
There really is no spoon?
Do you really think anyone is immune?
Study a foreign language sometime. People don't enunciate clearly all the time, but are intelligible to everyone else, because they can pick the proper word up from context when you can't. The same thing can happen with sufficiently complex writing (e.g. Chinese, *especially* when hand written).
If you think you're somehow immune, you're far less perceptive than most. You've probably never taken a good look at optical illusions, or you'd know how badly your perception can be distorted.
But you talk as though you're somehow completely objective. Is that what attracted you to atheism? The notion that you could see the world in a completely objective manner with it? Atheist or not, you've been completely deceived if you think that your eyes cannot be.
... the transient appearance of Vista SP1.
Have gnu, will travel.
Oblig Picard/ST Ref
I went to a local meeting of the AES (Audio Engineering Society) last week. The talk was about how we perceive stereo sound. The final demonstration was a mystery box with two "circuits" in it. When he switched a circuit in, there would be a 1/2 second delay, and then we would hear it. So we could know what circuit it was it would light either a red or a blue led would light. The then proceeded to play a series of samples 3 times each, one for each circuit and one plain. He used the circuits and plain in different orders as he was working through various samples. When he was done he asked us what we heard each circuit do to the sound. He specifically ask if there was no difference. Now this was a room with about 40-50 audio industry people. Some were students or interested people like my self, but 2/3 were practicing professionals.
When he asked for comments he got a lot of thoughtful comments and different ideas. I personally thought the red circuit had more room sound and sounded warmer and the blue circuit sounded like the microphone was further back in the room and was more ethereal. Nobody said "no difference".
He then reveled that the circuit was nothing more than a LED selector switch and a 1/2 second mute circuit. Otherwise it was a straight wire as far as the audio is concerned. During the demonstration he went to great lengths to not state that the circuits did anything and he mentioned several times "is there no difference?". A room full of audio professionals and not one got it right. He said he had been giving the demonstration for years and so far only two people had said "no difference". He also said that people thought the red circuit was warmer and the blue circuit was more spacious which agreed with my own perceptions. It was one of the best audio demonstrations I had been to in a long time. I left laughing at myself. I was caught just like all the others.
RLH
A former Rock and Roll Sound Guy
THERE... ARE... FOUR LIGHTS!
When we see things they are not labeled for us, nor is anything described. Our eyes stream video to our brain, and our ears stream audio, and so on. It is at our core that we process the messages that come in, use associations and memory to decypher what we see. Everything is open to interpretation based on what we know already.
Fortunately for us, reallity is very consistent. However, time to time, when reallity does something unexpected, the first thing that happens is we try to approximate it with something we've seen. This is when mistakes happen very easily. Reality can also be cryptic or deceptive when the messages it creates are mixed.
So is this, but all kinds of conspiracy nuts keep saying they see faces there. Clearly it's just a bunch of rocks on the side of a cliff! People need to question what they see more.
so in other words, there is now science behind the Somebody Else's Problem Field :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else's_Problem_field
This isn't terribly surprising. In the military you learn the principles of why things are seen. The entire concept is about understanding that perception is very much about expectation. For instance, one thing you're taught is that position has a lot to do with it. If you see a large object on a road, your brain will tend to see it as a vehicle, even if it's not. Similarly, you can open the door of your fridge and not "see" the ketchup on the shelf because you were expecting to find it in the door.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
When I was in about the tenth grade, I went to the boy's room during lunchtime, where the smokers traditionally congregated. Something was wrong--I couldn't put my finger on it, but standing there at the urinal I was strangely hesitant to relieve myself.
All of a sudden, I realize there's several girls hanging out with the smokers, all of them staring at me and giggling, and me standing there in front of the urinal doing nothing.
I didn't see them in there because I wasn't looking for girls in the boy's room.
Needless to say--I pay attention to this day!
expandfairuse.org
A way of understanding what is happening is that the brain stops seeing what is happening until it sees a change of some sort. Thus if the magician tells you something will happen when he stops throwing balls you will keep seeing balls being thrown until he does something else. By then the trick has already been done and you are shocked into the current reality.
Isn't it the brain that does the "expectation" part as well? If yes, the brain expects to see something, and the same brain tells itself that it saw something it had been expecting all along? Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy
Or is our subconscious "not part" of our brain? Just curious...
Why it's labeled "insightful" makes no sense to me. It was condescending & insulting to the poster who was making a point that comes direct from the Enlightenment:
- use rational reasoning; investigate; question
People who don't follow Enlightenment humanism, and don't question thing are:
- superstitious; zealots; easily fooled
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I don't understand people who think they can do "other stuff" while driving. Just yesterday I almost got hit by a man who was so busy talking into his cell phone (yes it was handsfree headset so technically legal), that he drove right through a red light!
Dumb driver.
The brain is not a computer; it's can't multitask. It can timeslice, where it gives 50% of the time to the car and 50% of the time to the cellphone*, but devoting only 50% attention to driving is just not enough. You need to keep your attention focused & watching-out for anything that might suddenly pop-up in front of you (like a red light).
*
* In the case of yesterday's near-miss, I suspect that man was time-slicing his brain in this manner:
- 5% on driving
- 95% on whomever he was talking to
Well, he almost bought me a brand-new paintjob - it was that close. IMHO cell phones should be completely outlawed while driving. Along with shaving your beard, combing your hair, changing your clothes... basically anything that takes your eyes (or ears) away from the road.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.