[Xmca-l] Re: imagination and controlling the perception of visual illusions.

[Greg Thompson]

Lovely Huw!

You say that the speed of the train suggests that it is going away. But why
would you assume that a train would be coming into a platform from the
right? (my experience with most CTA platforms in Chicago is that, from the
perspective of a person standing on the platform, they enter from the left).

It seems that you are entirely correct in suggesting that how we see things
depends on culture (qua memories/experience/expectancies - e.g. from which
direction a train enters a station - reminds me of an old story the German
spy in England who was able to go unnoticed until, upon crossing an empty
street, he looked to the left before crossing).

Cheers,
greg

p.s. And thanks for this - I'll use it for my Anthro of Experience class
since we have been doing visual perception! And I'm a sucker for a good
illusion.
This also seems an opportune time to remind all of Etienne and Mike's paper
Minding the Gap. Their degradation of the stimulus example comes to mind as
another nice example of perception being mediated by culture and history.



On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:

> I came across this meme/advert on linkedin, which is an animation of a tube
> train:
>
>
> https://buffer-pictures.s3.amazonaws.com/c2f41e8d32861d26bdecfc62f0d979e3.f009ceaeaf27dba4eb65f2ca247e9513.php
>
> Ignoring the glib annotation, it did seem to be a little interesting to
> discover if there was a reliable way to manipulate the perception of the
> direction of the train.
>
> Interestingly, this is something that I find I can do by imagining that I
> can see an object within the train moving in the direction I wish, so that
> perceived direction can be switched at will -- i.e. the perception of the
> train can be shuttled back and forth.
>
> I'm not sure whether conditioning of memories of living in London would
> influence this (it is a London tube train).  Also, the speed at which the
> train is going suggests its going away, because a train coming into a
> platform would usually, I think, be going slower.
>
> Best,
> Huw
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson