Daniel Simon's recent posting in the Invisible Gorilla Blog is pretty interesting stuff. Read on:
When we look at the world around us, we feel that we are seeing it as it is. Most of the time, we are — but not because our visual system perceives the world precisely as it is. Rather, our visual system makes informed guesses about the contents of the world based on the compressed signal projected onto our eyes. And, for most practical purposes, those guesses are pretty good. Moreover, this “guessing” system work so seamlessly that we rarely notice any discrepancy between our guesses and reality. Only when we “break” the system can we reveal these default assumptions. Check out the link below for an interesting video:
Just as we can’t intuit the mechanisms of vision, we lack insight into the mechanisms of memory, reasoning, and thinking. Only when forced to confront what we’re missing do we realize that we’ve unwittingly made assumptions. We often have no idea how limited our abilities can be. The following change blindness video illustrates one such limitation:
