Heroes Not Zombies

Off the coast of southern France, I took a boat trip and from the boat, I took this photo, back over the wake we were leaving.
On the horizon there was this island.
What strikes me now, looking at the photo, is the similarity of shape between the island and the waves of the Mediterranean.
Two thoughts came to my mind.
First, how lovely! I love that kind of reflected symmetry between land and water.
Second, I’m reading a book about physics at the moment and yesterday I read the story of Einstein’s breakthrough thought that energy and matter are interchangeable. OK, this might be a bit of artistic license here, but there does seem to be a continuum from the energy-shaped waves, to the matter-shaped island.

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rock, originally uploaded by bobsee.

For those of you who enjoyed the recent “What do you See Here?“……..here’s another one!

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building, originally uploaded by bobsee.

Perception involves a lot more than just sensory inputs ordered by our eyes and brains in the way a computer would process an image.
We use memory to match the patterns we see to what we’ve seen before. And we use imagination to see more than could be seen by a machine.
What do you see when you look at this?
What do you see first of all, what does it remind you of, and, if you were to use your imagination, what would you see then?

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I’ve been to game reserves in South Africa a few times. I tell you, until you’ve been yourself, you’ve no idea how difficult it is to spot an elephant or a giraffe! Seriously! Huge big animals but in their natural habitat, really they’re not easy to spot. What gives them away? Movement. As you scan the bush, or a plain, or a hillside, the first thing which will catch your eye is a movement. If they stay stock still, they might be only yards away but you won’t see them till the last minute.

Many animals are good at detecting scent change. The slightest whiff of a predator, or a human being, arriving on the scene and they pick it up.

Another example of how we give priority to change detection is noise. I’m sure you’ll have had the experience of a background noise suddenly stopping and it’s only at that moment when it ceases that you become aware it was even there. You notice it when it goes away, not when it stays the same.

Change impacts on us. It catches our attention. A recent study has examined this phenomenon and interestingly shows that we are much better at detecting auditory changes than visual ones. I’m not sure that holds true for everyone. One of the things that NLP teaches is how we have different processing preferences – by that they mean that some of us are especially good at processing visual information, others auditory, and yet others, kinesthetic. From what I can see the researchers who produced this study didn’t make any allowances for that.

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Take a look at this

Then have a look at this

What do you see?

If you see what I see, you see puddles of water in the impressions in the rock in the first photo, then in the second photo it looks like the water is standing up out of the rock, almost like those scattered drops of mercury that would fly across the floor if you dropped an old thermometer.

This is the same photo. First time shown to you the way I took it, and the second time with it rotated through 180 degrees. Isn’t that stunning?

By the way, these are the markings carved into rocks of the Kilmartin valley, in Scotland, in Neolithic times.

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oldglass, originally uploaded by bobsee.

The glass in this window is very, very old. These days, a pane of glass like this would be tossed into the reject bin quick as a flash. And what would we have lost?
Look at the textures, the shapes, the whorls and lines almost like a fingerprint, and that’s what this is – a unique, one-off, handcrafted work.
“But you can’t see through it very clearly!”
That’s true. But does that bother you? Is all glass for seeing through? This pane of glass lets in the light and it sits in its frame with its marks, its folds, its what you might prefer to call flaws, beautifully displayed.
I stood and gazed at this glass for ages. Can’t say many modern panes of glass have caught me that way!
There is a beauty in uniqueness, and that beauty is never found in homogenised, mass-produced, “perfection”.
Japanese culture has a word for this – wabi-sabi – it’s funny how there’s no direct translation into English.

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