Personal Development for Smart People Forums - View Single Post - Are your eyes seeing more than your brain ?

searstower · 03-05-2007, 11:17 PM

Douglas Adams wrote an interesting bit related to this in one of the HitchHikers Guide to the Universe books. It's a completely fictional comedy science fiction book.

According to 'the guidebook', "The Somebody Else's Problem field (SEP field) is a cheaper and more practical alternative to an invisibility field.

"An SEP field is a generated energy field which affects perception. Entities within the field will be perceived by an outside observer as "Somebody Else's Problem", and will therefore be effectively invisible unless the observer is specifically looking for the entity.

"This effect is greatly heightened if the entity within the field is already unexpected or out of place. It should be noted that a SEP field won't render an object invisible if it is expected to be there, and an SEP-cloaked object may be noticed out of the corner of the eye."

Of course, some of the more die-hard fans have inspired actual scientific tests to see if this holds up in real life. According the Wikipedia:

The idea of the SEP field has some grounding in the real life idea known as static filtering, in which people immediately disregard information contrary to what is expected. An example of malicious use of static filtering is the theory of subliminal messages in visual media. This theory is also put to practice in the film Fight Club; viewers are shown brief glimpses of a specific character as he suddenly appears and disappears, yet first-time viewers will generally disregard the flash unless they are told about its significance.

There exists a related phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. Essentially, when a person is paying close attention to a specific object or task, they are unlikely to remember anything else about the scene. This was reported on clearly by Daniel J Simons and Christopher F Chabris of Harvard University in their study "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events" (Harvard University, 1999).

This study discusses subjects who were told to carefully watch a televised basketball game and count the number of passes made or other similar tasks. Most of the subjects failed to notice when the scene changed in various ways, such as the ball being thrown off court (with the players continuing to mimic passes), or exchanging all the male players for women. In the most dramatic example, nearly half the viewers failed to notice a woman carrying an umbrella and a man in a gorilla suit walking across the screen in the middle of the video.

It sounds like you've got some real life science to back up your theory there. Our eyes may see everything, but we don't notice everything in our field of vision, especially if we don't expect it to be there.

03-05-2007, 11:17 PM	#5 (permalink)
searstower Member Join Date: Dec 2006 Posts: 84	the SEP field Douglas Adams wrote an interesting bit related to this in one of the HitchHikers Guide to the Universe books. It's a completely fictional comedy science fiction book. According to 'the guidebook', "The Somebody Else's Problem field (SEP field) is a cheaper and more practical alternative to an invisibility field. "An SEP field is a generated energy field which affects perception. Entities within the field will be perceived by an outside observer as "Somebody Else's Problem", and will therefore be effectively invisible unless the observer is specifically looking for the entity. "This effect is greatly heightened if the entity within the field is already unexpected or out of place. It should be noted that a SEP field won't render an object invisible if it is expected to be there, and an SEP-cloaked object may be noticed out of the corner of the eye." Of course, some of the more die-hard fans have inspired actual scientific tests to see if this holds up in real life. According the Wikipedia: The idea of the SEP field has some grounding in the real life idea known as static filtering, in which people immediately disregard information contrary to what is expected. An example of malicious use of static filtering is the theory of subliminal messages in visual media. This theory is also put to practice in the film Fight Club; viewers are shown brief glimpses of a specific character as he suddenly appears and disappears, yet first-time viewers will generally disregard the flash unless they are told about its significance. There exists a related phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. Essentially, when a person is paying close attention to a specific object or task, they are unlikely to remember anything else about the scene. This was reported on clearly by Daniel J Simons and Christopher F Chabris of Harvard University in their study "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events" (Harvard University, 1999). This study discusses subjects who were told to carefully watch a televised basketball game and count the number of passes made or other similar tasks. Most of the subjects failed to notice when the scene changed in various ways, such as the ball being thrown off court (with the players continuing to mimic passes), or exchanging all the male players for women. In the most dramatic example, nearly half the viewers failed to notice a woman carrying an umbrella and a man in a gorilla suit walking across the screen in the middle of the video. It sounds like you've got some real life science to back up your theory there. Our eyes may see everything, but we don't notice everything in our field of vision, especially if we don't expect it to be there.