Can you actully look at a word, without distorting your vision, ie, you can see it clearly, without reading it or at least attempting to in your mind? Can anyone look at a picture (not abstract or stuff like that) without their mind figuring out what it is? Why is it we can’t? This has confused me for much of my life.
PLEASE–no jokes like, “In my high school there was a kid in the back of the class that couldn’t.” I’m serious, this is confusing!
“Whenever a man hears it
he is young, and Nature
is in her spring;
whenever he hears it, it
is a new world and a free
country, and the gates of
heaven are not shut
against him”
–Thoreau, on
the song of the wood thrush
People are basically pattern finding creatures - your brain is a pattern matching machine. If it wasn’t, you’d be in a lot of trouble. For instance, you see a new car on the street, a model you’ve never seen before. It doesn’t quite look like any car you’ve ever seen before, but you still know its a car.
True about the patterns, but why can’t we shut that system off?
hmmm…
also why can’t we block all sounds at will? why are we always hearing? sometimes it would be good to turn off my ears!
“Whenever a man hears it
he is young, and Nature
is in her spring;
whenever he hears it, it
is a new world and a free
country, and the gates of
heaven are not shut
against him”
–Thoreau, on
the song of the wood thrush
I look at words all the time and have no clue what they say…
Japanese words, Danish words, Spanish words…
Seriously, though, Cooper nailed it on the head.
Insofar as we can understand our own minds, finding patterns and sorting things into categories is something that we learn to do at an early age.
There is some thought that it even begins in the womb, as the child recognizes and responds to changes in light, heat, position and the moods of the mother.
If we were unable to do this, we would all be unable to interact with the world around us, we would be unable to learn anything.
Why can’t we shut it off? Can you stop trying to breathe when you are drowning? Can you halt parastalsis from moving the goop in your intestines around? It’s not the same thing, given the difference between para-sympathetic systems and autonomic responses, but it’s close.
Sorry about the lack of cites in here, guys, this is all from memory, so if I smurfed anything up, by all means, let me know.
“Winners never quit and quitters never win, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.”
I’d say we are able to turn these things off, to at least a minimal degree.
If I am deep into a book, I frequently don’t hear things going on around me. This is why I never owned a radio until relatively late in life. If I was reading I wouldn’t even hear the radio, and I was always reading.
If I am reading a book in the park but am actually eavesdropping on the couple at the next bench over my eyes will keep scanning the text, my fingers will keep turning the pages but my brain will not be comprehending a single word on the page and I will have to go back and reread those pages I just “read.”
As to why we can’t willfully turn these behaviors off I would guess that there is simply no evelutionary reason why such a skill would be useful and many evolutionary reasons why it could be harmful.
Try this. Take a set of pictures of faces you are familiar with. Now look at them one by one but turn them slightly at an angle. There will be a critical point beyond which recognition fails to succeed due to the lack of the familiar orientation. Try it with maps of regions you know (except, of course the big rectangulars). There is a complex formula which uses the value of that angle measure, but it escapes me at the moment.
There are far too many Baldwins. The only Baldwin I care for is a piano …
I read words upsidedown, in the mirror, backwards, pieces of them jumbled back together, I just have to do it. But I have enought control sometimes to not do it.