There are certain phenomena in the world where a difference exists between two or more things, which can be detected by many or most people, but not by some.
The current thread “Why does HD TV look like 80’s BBC sitcoms.” (a question ending with a period, which is interesting) brought this subject to mind for me. In that thread, the posters determine that the answer to the OP’s question is the famous “soap opera effect,” a result of the frame-interpolation feature of most modern TVs, many of which come out of the factory with the feature on by default. It gives the screen that ultra-smooth, crisp, somewhat washed-out look of shows that were filmed on video, which looks “wrong” when watching a movie.
The reason I bring this up is that I have a friend who simply cannot see this. We’ve watched movies together several times at my house or his, and if the feature is turned on I’ll notice it and want to turn it off first. But he just says “I can’t see the difference.”
“See how everything looks a little too crisp and smooth, like the video quality of a soap opera?” I ask.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
So I turn the setting off and on and try to show him the difference, but he says he simply can’t see a difference.
This led me to realize there are other, analogous phenomena. Here are 2 more I can think of:
The “Mary/merry/marry” distinction, which I know has been discussed numerous times on this board before. Being from greater Philadelphia, I pronounce those 3 words differently. The vowel sound of the first syllable is different between all 3. But I know there are some regions, for example, the upper Midwest, where people pronounce all 3 exactly the same way. (To my ear, the way they pronounce them is closest to the way I pronounce “Mary.” Amusingly, I once dated a girl from Chicago named Mary, who teased me about the way I said “marry.”) What’s interesting to me is that some people who pronounce all 3 the same, claim not even to be able to hear a difference in the way those of us who pronounce them differently do so. In a previous thread on the subject, someone said he tried to demonstrate the difference to someone he knew by pronouncing all three with exaggerated vowel sounds and facial expressions (so the person could see how the positions of his lips and tongue were different,) but the person still claimed not to be able to hear the difference!
The white-and-gold or black-land-blue dress controversy from about a year and a half ago. This is one in which I’m one of the ones who can’t “see.” In the photo as originally circulated, the dress looks white and gold to me. I understand, from an intellectual standpoint, that the photo was overexposed, and I’ve seen the darkened photo which makes the dress look blue, and I’ve seen the other, better photos of the actual dress which clearly show it to be blue. But I can’t look at that original photo and make my brain see the dress as blue.
I would say no; things like colorblindness are well-defined traits with known causes. I’m thinking of things which it seems like people “should” be able to pick up on but can’t.
Listening is something very few people learn how to do, but there is a whole vivid and varied world of sounds out there, that are easy to read. Right after WWII, there was street construction work going on near my house, and us kids would hang around and badger any worker who tolerated us. One of them said he could identify any kind of truck, by the sound of the engine, so we tested him, and he got every truck right, when it approached behind his back. He said he learned to to that overseas, so if a truck was herd rumbling in the distance, the troops would know if it was an allied or enemy truck. You can also easily learn the very different sounds of the starters in all the different makes of cars. I learned to recognize the sound of my wife shutting the car door when she came home.
There’s a story about the famous bird-guide writer Roger Tory Peterson, who still led groups when he was quite old, but one day wasn’t feellng well, so stayed at the lodge while the group went out. They came back very excited and exclaimed “We saw 42 species of birds!” Peterson replied “I heard 65 out the window while lying in bed.”
It all depends on the setting of your monitor. I’m sure if all people saw the exact same photo print* of it, they’d all agree on the color. But people only saw it on computer and TV screens, so the settings made a difference.
That many cheeses smell like vomit. I’ve admitted many times here that I’m a fairly picky eater and cheese is at the top of my hate list, so I know I’m probably biased. But to me the two smell *exactly *the same and I wonder if no one else notices it, they notice it but don’t care or if they just perceive the smell totally different than I.
I couldn’t come up with any great examples like the OP, but I totally relate to everything he said. It’s funny that we should be talking about “the dress” as I, for reasons that I cannot recall (maybe someone mentioned it here?), was just recently looking it up on Wiki. At the time of the initial controversy I could not see it as gold and white no matter how many different photos of it I looked at. I thought I remembered that it was really blue and black and when the page came up it looked gold and white with the caption “the original picture of the dress”. WTF? I scrolled through to read the article and when I went back to the top it looked blue and black. I know this is an old topic but I had never seen it as gold and white and it blew my mind just a little bit.
A few years ago when they were still common I considered buying a plasma TV because they got such great reviews, however every one I looked at seemed to have a barely noticable but distinctly present flicker, when I asked people about it they thought I was crazy. I eventually came to the conclusion that I was picking up something from how plasma TV’s displayed the picture that nobody else seemed to notice.
That dress has always appeared white and gold to me (actually very pale blue and gold to be exact), I have to assume people who say its black and blue aren’t lying, but wow it kind of freaks me out a little that people can look at something and quite literally perceive it in such different ways.
On a different note although this may not quite be what you meant by the thread but it reminds me of something which happened years ago when I was still living at home. My dad and brother were watching a motorbike road race, I wasn’t really paying attention but an incident happened which made my jaw drop, while racing through a wooded area one rider quite distinctly rammed another rider causing quite a serious accident. My surprise was noticed and I was asked what was wrong, I pointed out what had happened but my dad and brother dismissed it, like the commentator they said it was just an accident, these things happen, it wasn’t intentional. I asked them to rewind the tape so I could see it again, and yep, the first rider quite clearly looked over his shoulder, waited until the faster rider started to pull alongside, then shifted his weight to give the other rider a nudge causing him to come off. I am still absolutely 100% convinced it was a deliberate action, I think perhaps the idea was dismissed because surely a rider wouldn’t do that? Its another example of people watching the same event but perceiving it very differently.
This is a very interesting one because it is linked to how people perceive phonemes. Phonemes are the sounds that speech is composed of, and they are processed in the brain in a different way than hearing more generally. In short, to reduce the cognitive load, variants of a single phoneme are most often perceived as the same despite any “acoustical” differences between them. For you, the Mary/merry/marry thing represents three phonemes, and so you can easily tell them apart. For others, where Mary/merry/marry represents just one phoneme, all three sounds, even if it is you who are pronouncing them, appear the same to them. This phenomenon explains why many people can’t tell that the D of “wide” and the D of “width” are different, and stereotypically, but not exactly inaccurately, why Japanese people who learn English as a second language have such trouble telling the difference between L and R even when they can produce the difference and even if their own speech is played back to them. In Japanese, L and R are just like the two D’s of English.
Now, people can distinguish all these sounds quite easily when they are presented as something other than speech. Focusing on lip movements and the like though, is unlikely to help people from sense these sounds as just sounds, though.
Something which people don’t usually notice consciously but which influences their perception very strongly is what my teachers called “presentation”; the aesthetics in which the message is wrapped.
If you have to present the same information to many disparate people, it’s best if you can group them up by “mindset type” and present the information to each group with different colors and lettering. Engineers like bright colors, Finance people black and white, Saleswomen like pastels. I’m not sure what would agressive salesmen like, but it probably should include small pictures of fast red cars.
“YIELD” signs, “KEEP MOVING” signs, and that strange little stick-thing on the steering column that, if pushed, makes a clicky noise and a light flash on and off on one side of the car for some unknown reason.
Oh God, another one. Last Friday I was in a roundabout, outside lane, and a guy tried to exit through my car (we’re both ok, but he will have had to explain to his gf as it was her car, and mine will be in the shop for two weeks). In that particular roundabout and at that particular time, visibility is shit because the low sun blinds you, so at least there was a physical reason for his “I didn’t see you!”
But very often I see people entering roundabouts without looking to see if someone is in it and moving past their entrance; it’s as if they expect that the whole world will be following the exact same path they do. The roundabout may have between 3 and 8 exits, but hey, only the two they are interested in have enough space in their brains. The owner of the body shop was surprised I got hit by someone exiting the roundabout, he’s used to “roundabout = idiot entered without looking”.
I noticed it, but it’s worth it when I get it past my nose. My family refers to some of my dairy choices as ‘outdoor cheese’.
Many fermented foods smell like nasty things - kimchi smells like the bins behind the greengrocer. Thai fish sauce smells like the bilge of a fishing boat.
The place on the computer where you go to make it stop doing that annoying thing. I used to try to show people how to get into settings/prefs and find the setting they want to change, but after having to do/explain it over and over and over, I settled in to just fixing it myself as quickly as possible.
My videos no longer produce sound.
Maybe you should unmute it. How do I do that?
You see that key on the lower left marked “fn”? Hold that down and hit the mute key on the top row.
We’re all different. My husband and 3/4 of my sons can look at mountains and say the names of those mountains, and they can do this from any angle. They all look alike to me. At one point some of these people were very irritated that the mountains on the license plates of Colorado were generic mountains and not a Colorado skyline. Well, i couldn’t tell. For me, you see one mountain, you’ve seen them all. I do know that the mountain I see at the end of the street is a certain mountain, but if I see it from some other place I just can’t tell.
But I can look at a page of type and say, “Oh, 12 point Helvetica,” for instance, and also see pretty much instantly if there is a typo on the page*.
*If someone else typeset the page. If I did it, I have to wait to see the typo. Until it’s published.
I suppose I could learn to distinguish mountains if I had to, and likewise someone could learn to distinguish typefaces, but to me, one thing seems much, much easier than the other, almost instinctive.
Once we had a ping-pong table that we set on top of our dining room table, and when we took it off, the dining room table emitted a smell that one of my sons and I could smell and found rather sickening. The others smelled nothing and thought we were nuts.
Senses can be developed. Like I did not notice subtle differences between shades of color. Then worked in an art store for awhile touching up paintings. I became MUCH better at matching colors exactly (to the satisfaction of my boss).
And I was able to hear higher frequencies than other people when younger.