Looking without seeing
The fast pace of postmodern life seems to be stretching our Stone Age brains to the limit.Our "visual scratch pad"--the part of our brain that attends to visual details, creating short-term memory of the world around us--holds so little information that we can actually look at an object without registering that it's there.
Recent studies, reports the UK Telegraph, suggest that short-term visual memory, controlled by a penny-sized region of the brain near the back of the head, cannot comprehend all of the stimuli our eyes and brain receive.
This is especially true if we've been told to attend to particular details.
In one experiment, people were asked to view a videotape of a basketball game and count the passes made by one of the teams.
"Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest," the Telegraph Connected reports.
"However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape."
This conclusion isn't earth-shattering--it certainly confirms something most of us intuitively know--but it may carry implications for worship, pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, and other forms of pastoral care.
And I immediately wonder: Can the sort of mindfulness training advocated by major religious traditions (see the writings of Brother Lawrence, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Kabir Helminski) expand our visual short-term memory?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, May 10, 2004
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