apophenia explained

In my recent posts I have mentioned making connections and seeing patterns. By random meandering through the blogsphere I have found a description: Apophenia: the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data (wikipedia).

I have also been trying to find the classic perceptual illustration of the dalmation that is, essentially, a collection of shapes that our brains organise into the message - look, a dalmation. If you have never seen a dalmation (or a dog), then you have no experience to connect so you may not see the dog at all. I have heard or read somewhere that the indigenous people of south america could not see the shapes of the spanish vessels on the horizon becasue they did not have anything with which to associate. I guess that is possible?

Of course then there is the Gestalt theory that suggests:the primacy of the whole in perception, not as an accumulation of perceptions of its parts but in something more. Our perceptions are subconsciously constructed towards the end of creating a perception as stable, or as "good" as possible. Our conscious mind is then presented with this organised percept of the whole.

I suppose that is why we enjoy novelty, but only when it has a safety cord. I call it the New/Knew phenomenon. Think about music, even when something is strange and different we like our tunes to conform to a genre at least. A hip hop rendition of Stairway to Heaven might be a curious thing, but we have the umbilical cord to the past in a way that the Kronos Quartet will never have.

I have begun adding a list of blogs that I regularly visit, I'll keep you posted.

Comments

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer

ThoughtSpurs

Search This Blog