“You look beautiful. Let’s go out to dinner.”
-Joe, pauper
Attention Blindness and Change Blindness, respectively.
Pretty well recognized perceptual facets.
I covered some of these things in this thread, in case anybody is curious.
The story of the buffalo seen as an insect, by the way, was reported by Colin Turnbull describing an incident in the former Congo in the 1950s with a BaMbuti pygmy as his subject.
Just because the native (pre)Americans did not recognize the ships as ships (which is logical given that recognition typically comes from experience and this is the first time they saw a ship) doesn’t mean they did not see the ships. The written description seems to sum it up pretty well, they could see all of the attributes of the ship and could relate those to things they were familiar with (birds wings etc.), but could not put it all together correctly simply because it was their first viewing.
So basically the story reminds us that our sensory perception is based on prior experience.
Hang on, hang on - these natives, they lived on islands, right, in the Caribean Sea, right?
ummm, how did they get there?
or, in other words, isn’t it kind of patronising to assume they couldn’t make the conceptual leap from “canoe” to “big canoe with sails”. Without any evidence, that is, because I still haven’t seen anyone pointing to any actual accounts of that being the Native experience with the Spaniards…
I guess it’s all in what you’re told ahead of time.
I sent my girlfriend the link for the monkey video and told her to count the passes between the players in black. Here’s her response:
Hmm…
-Joe
I have pictures I drew at age 4, of apartment buildings in “Perspectiva Caballera” (the X and Y axis are parallel to the paper, undistorted; the Z axis is tilted and gets scaled down, shortened; I’ve never been able to find out what is it called in English). I drew that way because that was what I saw from my window.
Discovering that Perspectiva Caballera was a 17th century invention completely blew my mind :eek:
That bit is complete BS.
Hell, by that standred, they shouldn’t have been able to see the Spanish, because they were White Europeans and they had never seen a white European before.
“Cavalier Projection”. Sometimes also called oblique projection.
The guy in the gorilla suit who walked across the screen from right to left? I was supposed to miss that?
Well… you were supposed to be told to focus on one team, generally the white team, and to count how many times the ball was passed. Many people, once given those instructions, simply do not see the gorilla. Many who are told to watch the black team also do not see the gorilla as they’re following the ball.
But if someone just says “Hey, here’s a video”, of course you’re most likely going to see the gorilla.
It is, after all, a demonstration of the phenomena known as attention blindness, not gorilla blindness. 