You Are Not So Smart
I’ve decided to start a sister blog, one focused on a single easy to share topic – self delusion. I’ll be writing about it from a scientific perspective, but I’ll try to stay away from too much clinical lingo.
Here’s the address right now: http://youarenotsosmart.wordpress.com/
Here’s the first entry:
The Misperception: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera.
The Truth: You are only aware of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.
Magicians build careers around inattentional blindness.
It takes just a smidgen of misdirection to conceal a change in your visual field. Innattentional blindness is literally looking without seeing. It turns out, your brain isn’t a passive receiver of your eyes. Instead, you actively participate, choosing what to perceive.
Many car accidents are the result of having your eyes wide open, but failing to see the car, the bike, the deer.
You are familiar with focusing attention on sounds. For instance, at a party you can listen to a single person talk while a cacophony of voices and music bounces around the room.
You tune out sounds all the time at work, in a city, watching television, turning down the volume on what you aren’t interested in – but you don’t notice it as much when you do it visually.
You are “blind” to that which you are not attentive.
As events unfold before you, you tend to pay attention to a small cone of information and then, when thinking back on what you saw, you tend to believe you saw more than you did.
Consciousness is all about filling in the gaps. You assume you know what’s happening right outside whatever it is you are focused on, but all over the place, you are imagining the things you can’t see.
So, when you form a memory, and then later recall that memory, anything which wasn’t right in the center of your attention is a fabrication – a dream.
This phenomenon takes a strange turn when you start to consider other ways of becoming blind to things which you can see, even if you are paying attention.
People who have been blind all their lives and then gain sight find it difficult to see the same objects and actions as those who are familiar with sight. They have no frame of reference for their perceptions, and so their conscious mind ignores the unfamiliar information.
This phenomenon can vary from culture to culture. Asian cultures seem to be less susceptible.
Inattentional blindness can also come about from an overload of visual information, all of it considered important, but all of it familiar. Experienced pilots are less likely to see a plane on the runway than pilots who have only landed a handful of times. Experienced lifeguards often miss a body at the bottom of a large, busy pool.
When it comes to seeing everything you’re looking at – you are not so smart.
Click here for More Examples.
