A pic of Albert Einstein. A bit blurry but, hey, what can you expect from a mid twentieth century pic?
But … wait a second. That's weird. I walked away from my monitor to get some coffee and when I glanced back at my monitor from across the room it looked like a picture of Marilyn Monroe, not Albert Einstein. And yet, now that I'm at my chair it's Einstein again. Hold on, I'm going to have to check this.
Okay, I'm across the room now and it's a picture of Marilyn. Coming back … Einstein.
How weird. Here, I'll wait a second for you to do the same. Just back away from the monitor and see whether Einstein morphs into Marilyn when you're a few feet back.
Ha! It did, didn't it? Isn't that a cool piece of code? It senses when you're far away and then alters the picture. Then when it senses you're close it changes it back. Kind of like how kids behave nicely when someone's watching but act rotten when they're alone. We're watching you …
Wait, wait! Don't call the Feds! The picture isn't really changing. You suspected as much, didn't you? So what IS changing? What's changing is the way your brain interprets the picture. To demonstrate a bit more of what's going on I took Einstein's picture and then performed a Gaussian blur on it in Photoshop, producing this:
Notice how it now looks like Marilyn, just as it did when you moved away from the screen. This is a great example of how we don't really "see" what's there all the time. Or even most of the time. The reason the Einstein pic changes is that as you move away your ability to resolve fine detail is reduced. That's why the eye doctor shows you all lines of type that get smaller and smaller. He's determining what resolution your eye is capable of. The reason we see Einstein's face is because it's drawn in with finely detailed lines. As we move back these start to blur out. And when they do, our brain fixates on the higher level blurry image – that of Marilyn.
You can also get the effect by either grabbing the picture or the whole browser pane with your mouse/cursor and making it move around randomly. You'll see Marilyn pop in and out as you do because your eye isn't capable of precisely tracking the image as it moves.
Very interesting, eh? So in the future when someone says "believe me, I saw it with my own eyes," you're on solid ground if you want to remain a bit doubtful.
Crow's Quote for a Lazy Weekend
The eye conceals but the heart reveals.
author: Me!
I burdened some of you guys with a goofed RSS feed so I thought I'd make amends with a double dose of real content today. And the second item is this quote. Magicians have known for centuries that it's not difficult to fool the eye. Cognitive researchers have uncovered so much evidence along this line that it's a wonder we can believe anything our eyes show us, as the Einstein/Marilyn pic demonstrates.
So how can our heart do any better? Because when I say "heart" I might just as well have said, echoing Stephen Colbert, "in your gut." Or, as Darth Vader said, "Search inside of yourself, Luke. You know it to be true." (Sorry if I might have unconsciously improved Lucas's dialogue – it's hard to get it quite as turgid as he does just from memory).
Why is it that our gut is so insightful? Well, because, of course, we're not really talking about our tummy tum tum but about our brain. Our brain is exactly the same guilty party that finds it difficult to use our eyes effectively and is also the source of all our "gut" intuition. There is a difference though. When our eyes are fooled we're not really "thinking" – we're just looking at something. So we presume that there's no thought going on at all as we watch – just a recording of what the world is doing. But that's not really the case. Our eyes do send signals to our brains but what our brains DO with that information is what causes us to see, or not-see, what's really happening. Our brain has a large database representing "the world as it knows it" and works hard to fit new images into that structure.
When our gut gets involved we're doing a different kind of thinking. Much higher level. Now we're creating connections between disparate pieces of information and data and using a host of subtle clues, such as body language, previous experience, intonation, and so forth, to create a final conclusion. Much of the mental processing is unconscious but it's no less powerful because of that.
There's nothing wrong with being guided by your gut – it's less likely to be swayed by surface detail and more likely to cut to the heart of the matter. Like they say in the movies – "Listen to your heart."
Love the post!