In their book, The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander say that humans "perceive only the sensations that we are programmed to receive." That statement makes me wonder if different individuals perceive different things. Its been proven that cats, dogs, and other animals see differently than humans, and according to the Zanders, its because they see what they need to see to survive. But what about humans? Does one human see things differently than another human?
After reading just the first few paragraphs of the first chapter and thinking about the statement above, I was reminded of the movie Mallrats. There's a particular scene where Willem (played by Ethan Suplee) has been staring at a MagicEye 3-D poster for hours trying to see a sailboat, while everyone around him glances at the same poster for a few seconds and sees the boat with no problems. Willem gets aggravated with everyone because they can see the sailboat and he can't.
So why couldn't Willem see the sailboat? Was he not programmed to see it or was he just not "relaxing his eyes" like the other characters advised him to do?
**I apologize for the quality of the video posted. The video I wanted to post does not allow embeds, so I couldn't embed it into this post. It can be viewed here, however.
No comments:
Post a Comment