DailyDirt: Everyone Has Blindspots
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
A few years ago, there were some video demonstrations about perception and how when you’re focused on looking for one thing, you can completely miss seeing obvious other things (like a gorilla or other monkey business). People tend to rely on vision a lot (unless you’re Daredevil), but it’s not always the most reliable sense.
- If a person who was born blind could be given eyesight, would he/she be able to understand a visual world based on past sensory (eg. tactile) experiences? This is called Molyneux’s problem, and the answer appears to be “nope” — based on several congenitally blind patients who gained vision by various surgeries (to remove cataracts, etc). People who gain vision can subsequently learn how to map their tactile knowledge to their new eyesight, but it takes some time. [url]
- Prosopagnosia is a different kind of blindness — it’s also called “face blindness” and gives people suffering from it the inability to recognize faces (and even facial expressions). This problem can also affect a person’s ability to recognize animals and cars, as well as a sense of direction. This disorder might also not be that uncommon if about 2.5% of the population has it, and there’s no cure, but maybe augmented reality glasses might help. [url]
- Blindsight may be a strange form of consciousness? Some people with healthy eyes can be blind if their brains don’t recognize visual stimuli, but visual information may still make its way into a subconscious awareness. Blindsighted patients can sometimes recognize facial expressions, and blindsight can be induced in normally-sighted volunteers using transcranial magnetic stimulation. [url]
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Filed Under: blind, blindsight, eyesight, face blindness, molyneux's problem, prosopagnosia, senses, transcranial magnetic stimulation, vision
Comments on “DailyDirt: Everyone Has Blindspots”
Can A Blind Artist Draw Using Perspective?
Yes.
Re: Can A Blind Artist Draw Using Perspective?
Thank you for the link. Wow!
For further reading...
If you want to learn more about this kind of thing, I cannot recommend Oliver Sacks ‘The Mind’s Eye’ highly enough.
Re: For further reading...
Interestingly, Oliver Sacks has admitted that he is face-blind.
I’m not face-blind, but I’m horrible enough at recognizing faces to understand it. More than once I’ve been through the “You remember who I am, do you?” routine. “Nope, I have no clue.” It seems to distress other people a lot more than me…
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I’m kind of the opposite. I’m great with faces, but terrible with names. There are far too many people among my coworkers, people I interact with every day and know on sight, who I identify mentally as nothing more than “this one”, “that guy”, “him”, or “her”.
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Yeah, I’m the same – I never forget a face, but rarely remember a name. Part of that is because my family moved a lot when I was a kid. Names became unimportant as I’d (probably) never see them again.
I’m pretty sure morphic fields are the key to overcoming my prosopagnosia. I’ve set up an experiment – a sort of game, if you will – to test my hypothesis, and it only took 18 orphans to pull off.
Drunk RNC Convention
Might be an improvement. Ko