How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
October 8th, 2009I liked this New York Times piece. Here are a couple of related terms that Cryptogon readers may find interesting.
Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to see things that are actually there. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental distractions. The phenomenon is due to how our minds see and process information. Closely related to the subject of change blindness, it is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time. Any otherwise salient feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention.
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.
…
Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological differences or mental illness. In the case of autistic spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome and individuals who are autistic savants, individuals may in fact be aware of patterns (such as those present in complex systems, large numbers, music, etc) that are infrequently noticed by neurotypical people. Rather than being aware of patterns that do not exist, autistic individuals may be aware of meaningful patterns within situations that appear meaningless to others.
I’ve always been a bit weird when it came to noticing things. When I was very young, I’d notice reflections of film crews on shiny objects or panes of glass on the set. (Cars are a particular bitch for cinematographers to deal with.) Older BBC shows are hilariously bad from a technical production standpoint. Seeing the shadow of a boom microphone move over the scene used to cause in me an almost physical unease.
Watching DVDs with me can be like this:
“Did you see that?”
“What?”
“The boom mic shadow was in the shot.
“What?”
Rewind. Play. Pause.
“Right there. That’s the boom mic.”
For me, looking into alternative viewpoints is no different than noticing that boom mic shadow, or the distinctive shape of a Panavision film magazine distorted and twisted around a chrome bumper. That stuff is there. Other people can see it if their attention is directed at it.
Other times, however, there is no pattern and that boom mic shadow is a branch blowing in the wind and the movie camera reflection is a… motorcycle parked nearby, or… Who knows or cares!? Just watch the movie. Damn conspiracy theorists.
So, Cryptogon is an attempt to overcome people’s inattentional blindness, while avoiding apophenia and its myriad hamster wheels.
How do we know the difference? There are many metrics. Cryptogon readers like being weeks, months or years ahead of the average person’s informational awareness on many issues. For others, making money is a good measure. For a few, having left the building before it burned to the ground was a good thing.
I just happen to enjoy looking for patterns. Even when I know there probably aren’t any (or any that I’m capable of identifying), I like to look anyway. For example, I don’t write much about my ongoing research into black box trading systems, but, this is how I like to relax sometimes. Now, what’s the difference between what I’m doing there and John Nash’s backwoods “decoding” shed in the film, A Beautiful Mind?
I’m mostly sure that there’s no pattern that I’m capable of identifying visually, programmatically or otherwise.
I guess that’s part of the difference between being curious and crazy.
Via: New York Times:
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.
Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”
…
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
Kevin, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
indirectly related (imho):
“not seeing the obvious truth has become so ingrained that the majority do not even realize that they are perpetuating a falsehood”
Kevin,
I perceive what you post here on Cryptogon very differently than you do.
“I’m mostly sure that there’s no pattern that I’m capable of identifying visually, programmatically or otherwise.”
I perceive that you do perceive patterns – you may not know why you perceive them- but from my seat in the audience, you do indeed perceive patterns. Look at all of your categories where you shelve things!
I would agree that you may not know why or how you identify patterns – but identify them? Yes you do sir, and do well at this.
I love it when you go meta on systems, awareness and knowledge. Thanks for the refreshing splash of cold water.