Noticing the Unusual May Have Physiological Basis
Dean
Everybody knows this: the eye is drawn to the unusual and unexpected. Your eyes brush right over most things in your environment, but if it's odd or out of place, you tend to notice it pretty quickly--a banana in the middle of your floor, or a grimy handprint on an otherwise clean wall.
Interestingly, researchers at Harvard have found that this may not just be how your brain processes information, but that the eyeball itself may play a role in noticing the unusual: the retina seems to do some visual processing before it sends anything to the brain. Quoth the study's director: "Our eyes report the visual world to the brain, but not very faithfully. Instead, the retina creates a cartoonist's sketch of the visual scene, highlighting key features while suppressing the less interesting regions."
Fascinating. This probably explains why my wife often thinks the house is hideously messy when there are only a few odd things lying around that need a quick cleanup. :-)
Finally. Finally!!!
I swear to g-d that there has got to be a physiological basis for the difference between how men and women see things in the home.
Seriously though, the idea that the eye does some image processing strikes me as revolutionary.
I think your link isn't working, tho. :-(
(*Somebody Else's Problem)
I'm sure that is true. Women have a stronger sense of smell than men do, so why not better visual acumen?
I see and sometimes smell [shudder] that the house is dirty, Dean thinks it's fine. It also has to do with tolerance level. I do think that dirty socks belong in the laundry, Dean doesn't see a problem with the nasty buggers resting in the midst of
myour living room.We had a lot of fun growing up. The standing theory was:
Throw the dirty socks in a corner, if they don't stand up by themselves, they're not ready to wash.
There were so many rooms in our house, my mother only got to visit some but once a week. How many houses have laundry chutes any more ?
She was a saint, as all good mothers are.
So listen to your mom.
I have a keen sense of beauty vs. ugliness, however. My eye instantly gravitates to a beautiful woman, and also to bright colors.
1. Anyone who has designed sensors has most likely found that it's easier to detect differences than to detect absolute scale. The latter requires some sort of calibration; the former merely requires a detectable difference.
2. There's survival value in detecting differences. "Hmmm... That green thing over there isn't quite the same green as the green things around it. I wonder if it can hurt me."
Around 1987, Scientific American reported on a common experiment in perception. Take a grey card. Surround it with shades of red, and observers will see it as slightly greenish. Surround it with shades of green, and observers will see it as slightly reddish. Surround it with shades of blue, and observers will see it as slightly yellowish. Surround it with shades of yellow, and observers will see it as slightly bluish. And so on. And it's the exact same card every time. But the eye is more concerned with how it differs from its surroundings than in its absolute greyness.
(I was in the color measurement business at the time. Lemme tell ya, that was a bit of a disheartening discovery...)
Yes, I have long known about that chromatic effect, known as simultaneous contrast (as differentiated from successive contrast, a.k.a. after-image). I have many beautiful books on color, but my favorite is still Ellen Marx's classic Optical Color &Simultaneity, which details these effects in great depth.
And then there is the crazy phenomenon of not noticing something that is in plain sight. The most memorable incident of that for me was about 20 years ago, when I had recently moved into an apartment in Portland, Oregon. They hadn't put up the curtains when i moved in but were scheduled to do so soon. Anyway, one night, after coming back from a day at work, I sat re-reading The Fountainhead. I was reading the part where Dominique talks about "....curtains and desserts and religions...." when I suddenly looked up and exclaimed to myself: "They put the curtains!" I had to see the word in a book before I even noticed the thing right before my eyes!
The human mind is a strange thing....