Thursday, April 30, 2009

Playing Hooky

I'm feeling a little guilty, since I'm supposed to be finishing an article for a magazine and instead I'm writing here. But that's not the only thing that's keeping me away from the article. I've been working in a number of animations for the online course, which leads me to what I wanted to write about.
One of the things I like to do, to get inspiration for doing the animations, is look at the work of other people. I was having a problem with a "particle system", which I'm using to illustrate an embryology concept--this is one of those things that Rolfers seem to all do when we are explaining fascia, that being we resort to embryology to show that the body is not made up of "parts"--and searched the net to see if anyone else had solved this problem. What I found was a great website for a film/media school that had a montage of their work. www.brandnewschool.com
At the beginning of the montage the video had a roll of welcome text in different languages. Each language was in a different color and each sentence was on it's own line. So, the first line in each language came first. Then the second line in the paragraph...so that the languages were interspersed and you had to pick yours out of each paragraph. At first this was really confusing to me, but soon, within one or two lines my eye was locked on to the white english text.
This really interested me, so I ran the montage again and tried to not read the english but the concentrate on the german. Again, my eyes locked on the english.
Now I'm fascinated and wonder if this is indicative of how we see things we "know" but don't see things we don't know. You know?
Do any of you know if there's research into this kind of thing--beyond "what the blib do we know..."?
Ok, back to the article.

2 comments:

Juanjo said...

The visual information is divided through two different channels: one that goes directly to the visual cortex and another that goes to the prefrontal cortex, where the information is processed to "help" the visual cortex, in a top to bottom arrangement, make sense of the raw data. In this way, we see better what we already know than what we do not know.

The other piece that is important in this context is the executive attentional network, that has to do (among other things like planning or decision making) with overcoming habitual actions.

Jim Pascucci said...

That's very interesting. Thanks for sharing it.
There's also a process known as "biased message processing" which accounts for us only seeing and hearing what we want, or are biased towards.
Where I am going with this is trying to assure that when I instruct people that my biases are turned down as much as possible while at the same time available to help others learn what they are. This assumes that my biases are worth learning.
A slippery slope.
thanks again
jim