Re: First round of descriptive/external exercises

Helen Hall wrote: 
In article <cbeg23-p1j.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Aqua
<aqua@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

It's my understanding that that isn't necessarily true: the eye is not a camera and does not record images that way. There's already a fair bit of pattern detection before the signal leaves the eye, and those patterns are turned into objects as quickly as possible by the brain so that emergencies can be dealt with promptly. So there is a sense in which artists are learning to see in a new way, not just "what's there". 

This is getting well beyond the sphere of my knowledge, but I do know
that if you see something totally strange, it can appear as a
meaningless moving shape until the brain has managed to process it. This
happened to me when I was driving to work one day and saw, a hundred
metres or so ahead, a car rolling over and over towards me. Despite
having seen cars rolling on TV in car chases enough times, this is not
the normal behaviour of cars and I was seeing a familiar object in a
totally unfamiliar way. There was a noticeable period in which I just
could not make out what it was. I couldn't get the scale right. My brain
tried to make it into something like a box being blown along the road by
the wind. Then something clicked, my brain went, "Aarrgghh!" and I
pulled over to the side as it continued to roll, then somersaulted and
ended up on its roof on the wrong side of the road pointing back the
direction it had come. (The young driver turned out to be one of my
husband's students and miraculously escaped with only a fairly minor cut
to his ear.)

It's also somewhat beyond my knowledge. However, based on my understanding of the brain, what you were seeing was predictable: you saw something like a box, tumbling over and over. You didn't see colours and lines, your brain was turning that level of information into "solid object rolling down street". It's in fact so intuitive that you don't realise how remarkable it is until you talk to people who've been involved in trying to teach computers to see things.

The difference probably doesn't matter from a writer's point of view: being able to see a car afresh in this kind of way is at least as likely to provide original written description as being able to see it as colours and lines, the way an artist would have to in order to draw the car accurately.

Then of course there are the times the brain misinterprets what you're
seeing, like when you see a tomato stalk and think it's a spider, or the
dried up curled leaf that turns out on closer inspection not to be cat
poo. :-)

Heh. My most recent incident like that was mistaking a shrivelled-up hibicus flower for a chicken bone*. It's so much fun having a brain sometimes, spotting all the programming shortcuts and "goodenoughfornow"s :-).

Aqua
*I'd recently fed the cats fresh chicken, and they'd been playing with the bones and leaving them in random, unfortunate locations.
.

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