Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

An article by Carey Goldberg in the Boston Globe today discusses research on seeing:

''It used to be thought that perception was about us creating a copy of our environment inside our heads,'' something like a recording videocamera, said Ron Rensink, a noted vision researcher at the University of British Columbia.

But now, he said, scientists increasingly realize that perception works more like a Web browser: People can take in and store only a tiny portion of the scene around them - just as only a bit of the Web fits onto one computer screen - but they can gain access to an enormous array of information by choosing to focus on any piece of it.

Ignoring the rather random use of a Web browser as an analogy, this further confirms what we already knew: as my dissertation advisor, Graeme Nicholson, says, seeing is reading, i.e., it's an interpretive act. This is the point of Gombrich's Art and Illusion as well, one of my all-time favorite books.

The Globe article (the link to which will rot in a few days) points to Rensink's Web site where you can take some of the "change perception" tests yourself. Unfortunately, the link was broken as of 8:30am EDT this morning. But in searching for a replacement, I found a couple of excellent places. At AmoebaWeb there are tons of links to psychology articles and gadgets, including a link to some Flash animations by Mark Newbold that are kinda optical illusions. Not a replacement for Rensink's page, but a very nice distraction. And isn't that what the Web is all about?