Yes, but it works (much like all camoflage) by breaking up the silhouette so that the shapes are not recognizeable as “ship”. You can see SOMETHING is there but if the background is cluttered enough and the target does not move against it, your brain won’t recognize it as anything but shapes and shadows.
It doesn’t make it invisible (unlike the work that went on several decades later in the shipyards of Philadelphia ).
“Now, one thing they didn’t have were sword”
But I have to think that, as fishermen, they had knifes of some sort and were familiar with the concept of “sharp”.
Dr. Pert was actually in the movie. I can’t recall if she was the one narrating the story about natives with mental blocks, but it seems likely that she was the source. Here’s a list of the, ah, scientists involved in the movie.
Temple Grandin talks about a similar phenomenon in her book Animals in Translation . She calls it “inattentional blindness”; humans have it, animals do not. Basically, it’s the ability to see but not perceive things that are unexpected.
One study she relates is based on a video of a basketball game. Viewers are asked to watch the tape and count the number of passes. A few minutes into the game a woman in a gorilla suit clearly walks into the frame, faces the camera and beats on her chest. She then walks off. After the video is over, participants were asked about the gorilla and some high percentage (sorry I don’t have the book with me now to give the exact number) said, “what gorilla?”. After some prompting, a few vaguely remembered the gorilla.
Relevant to this discussion: only a very small percentage took notice of the gorilla and made a mental note of having seen it. Perhaps the Indians physically saw the ships but did not perceive them as memorable?
I’ve seen a very similar video—the one I saw had two overlapping basketball games and the woman wasn’t in a suit but had a large umbrella—and it is rather disconcerting to find out that you’ve missed something so obvious. I think there’s one important difference between that study and the story in the movie: you don’t see the woman in the gorilla suit because you’re specifically told to look for something else that takes a significant amount of concentration; the natives weren’t being misdirected in this way.
Sure they were misdirected - as people who relied on the ocean for their lives, they no doubt “read” it daily.
I don’t have time right now to read this whole thread, so please 'scuse me if someon already introduced this - - you might be interested to know that when Cezanne’s paintings were first shown, people didn’t know how to see them. They couldn’t interpret his brushstrokes and color as forms, b/c they’d never seen anything like it before.
As an artist, I find this aspect of the movie entirely believable. The remainder, I’m not so sure.
Yeah, but I’m sure they knew there were canvasses on the wall.
They just had no idea what they were supposed to represent. This sort of thing has been shown to happen in cross-cultural first experiences with some else’s art. But that’s vastly different from the claim that is attributed to the film by the OP that the locals couldn’t tell thery were ships there. It’s more like the interpretations that they saw the ships as mountains or islands, which have been cited above. And both of these are worlds away from being so distracted by other elements in your field of view that you miss something out of the ordinary.
If the OP is accurate in conveying what the film says, it still sounds utterly ridiculous. And unsupported.
So, what, no Dopers have ever been fooled by an optical illusion?
From Colibri’s cite, it does look like the film’s authors played hard & loose with the facts (big surprise). But with the other cites given here, the story told does seem to be representative of some experiences that are documented.
As others have said, it’s not a sight thing but an interpretation - that was how I understood the film. Happens all the time. It’s highly irritating that the filmmakers hung their story on a falsehood, but I think their point is still valid.
I didn’t make that comment, but I’ll just say that if you somehow inferred racism in the discussion about whether the natives could perceive Columbus’s ships, then you have missed the substance of the discussion.
By the way, my previous comment was directed at Crandolph.
I have a hard time giving them even that much, since the whole purpose of the film was to weave a story using delusional anecdotes and interpretations of quantum mechanics to support their goofy world view and support of the woman who has convinced them that she is channeling some 35,000 year old spirit (and convinces them to give her lots of money). These people are f’ing nuts, and it’s a stretch to say that their point, even on any aspect of this, is valid.
I’m not sure what she means by this. Animals of course regularly ignore things that are not pertinent to what they are doing at a given instant. A human standing still will often apparently not be perceived as such by birds or mammals that are perfectly well aware of what humans are, and which will flee if the human moves.
The story itself is bogus. There is no evidence that the Indians saw but did not perceive the ships.
I don’t think so. Are there Indian groups claiming (for example) that white people couldn’t see massive herds of buffalo because they’d never seen such a thing before, and, being out of their frame of reference, blew their minds? Why isn’t there a claim that Europeans out in the sticks who encountered their first train couldn’t see it? There are cultural reasons that people would pick this example in order to illustrate their (bogus) point, and that’s where I see a traditional racism operating.
Part of the implicit assumption I see in the wacky claim is that we’re either dealing with the Noble Savage (even with good intentions, that’s patronizing) or simple savages (demeaning), which in either event ends up being fairly well racist. Now, you may not see that, but if I do it doesn’t mean I’ve “missed the substance of the discussion” (which implies low cognitive or reading comprehension ability, therefore use of “stupid.”)
I am going to confine this post to the questions arising from the first contact by North Americans with Columbus. As Columbus states in his log (which we have thanks to the priest Las Casas):
It could be inferred, that is if we are to trust the provenance of this primary source document, that the Indians indeed saw Columbus and his men and were aware of their presence before they had come ashore in small boats. Although Columbus does not make allusion to the amount of time spent on the beach, the absence of any description would let us conclude that it was not an undue amount of time as well. We know that the time spent was confined to one day because the passage of the first contact is under October 11th and a day passes at sea. Therefore, Columbus reckoned the first contact on October 12th. The next entry in the log is dated October 13th. We conclude, reasonably, that Columbus had not been long on the beach before being approached by the Indians who had obviously prepared and therefore saw the ships.
The technology used by the Spaniards was not out of the realm comprehension for the Indians. They had boats made from wood just as the Spaniards. They were men just as the Spaniards. The argument about non-comprehension equating to non-perception does not have any basis in fact. It seems to me that this question is more a question of philosophy rather than history (the thought of this brings back horrid flashbacks of trying to understand Immanuel Kant). In short, Columbus was a man with superior technology but not so superior as to not be perceived by the Indians.
If we look at how the Spaniards viewed the New World we can gain some insight about how the Indians viewed them. When the Spaniards encountered animals like the buffalo, they would describe them in terms they could comprehend. An example of this comes from De Vaca and the chroniclers of the De Soto expedition who would often describe buffalo as wooly dark cattle, skunks as more pungent ermine, and opossums as “dogs”. In other words, they did not know what these strange animals were but could incorporate them in terms they could understand.
Which brings us to the subjectivity of any primary source. How do we know that Columbus is relating what he actually saw with the words we have from him? Simple answer is that there is simply no way of knowing. History cannot give us a complete understanding of the past; it can only reveal to us how history is perceived by our society at the present time.
Finally, the movie that started this thread must have taken some artistic license depicting this meeting of European and North American. I don’t see anything wrong with that given that people suspend reality enough to believe that there is a treasure map on the back of the Constitution. After all, it’s only a movie.
Good post. I am certain that the Indians percieved the ships. I can well believe that for a while they didn’t necessarily percieve the ships as ships, i.e. they didn’t understand what they were looking at. This would be especially understandable while the ships were distant, and after they first arrived and were at anchor. Until the spaniards tranferred to boats and made land, there’s not a lot of visual clues to work with. Even working out the size of them isn’t trivial, until you understand that those figures on the flat bit are people.
Thanks to TV and cinema, we have vicariously experienced examples of almost everything. I’ve seen tornados, auroras, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, manta rays, clouds of locusts, rockets lifting off - none of them first hand. It is very rare that I see something that is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, see something that just makes my brain go WTF?
I am inclined to believe that the account is accurate, e.g. that the “natives couldn’t see the ships”. There are TWO main issues here:
The new-agers are trying to make it sound more “mystical” than it really is
AND
The skeptics suffer from a lack of imagination.
One only has to play Boggle to realize that there are so many things that we can’t see that are right in front of us. You may think that this applies only to “special cases” like Boggle, but the whole point of the film is that THIS SORT OF PHENOMENON IS AN EVERYDAY OCCURRENCE! Our brain filters FAR, FAR more stuff than we take for granted.
Well you saw this zombie ship while the rest of us would have let it sailed by unseen so it is possible.
The story actually goes back to I believe Cook’s ships and the native Australians not seeing them except one medicine man who was only able to notice a disturbance in the waves. After trying for a while he was able to make out the ships and start pointing them out to others, where they started to see them.
[QUOTE=kanicbird;14877936The story actually goes back to I believe Cook’s ships and the native Australians not seeing them except one medicine man who was only able to notice a disturbance in the waves. After trying for a while he was able to make out the ships and start pointing them out to others, where they started to see them.[/QUOTE]
And how would anybody know this occurred? Cook’s crew only made contact with the natives twice. Once when they tried to shoot them to collect specimens to take home, and the second time when the natives tried to burn them to death.
During which if these encounters did the natives tell this exciting story?
).