Change Blindness: Real Power and the Coolest Psychology Experiment… Ever
December 30th, 2006This is a simple, clinical expression of how the game is played. This is the basic framework that underlies real, tangible power.
We all know that subduing the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
But how?
How is it done, specifically?
“By way of deception thou shalt do war.”
Keep Mossad’s motto in mind as you read the following material and check out the simple experiments:
Via: Mixing Memory:
The difficulty people have in noticing changes like this is called change blindness. There’s a pretty large literature on change blindness, and I don’t want to get into all of that right now, because I want to get to the coolest… experiment… ever, but I will give you a few of the conclusions from the literature, from Simons and Ambinder (p. 44):
1. “Change blindness occurs whenever attention is diverted from the change signal.”
2. “Changes to objects that are central to the meaning of the scene or changes to visually distinctive objects are detected more readily than other changes, presumably because observers focus attention on important objects
3. “Attention may be necessary for change detection, with changes to unattended objects going unnoticed.”
4. “Attention to a changing object may not be sufficient for change detection; observers frequently fail to detect changes to the central actors in motion pictures and to real-world conversation partners even though these people clearly are attended suggesting that change detection requires observers to encode the changing features before and after the change and compare them”
In short, change blindness is an issue of attention and representation. If we fail to represent an object in a scene either before or after a change, then we won’t notice the change, and we tend not to represent objects that aren’t important to the meaning of what we’re looking at, because we’re just not paying attention to them (though paying attention to them doesn’t guarantee representation).
This reminds me of a passage in Laurence Gonzales’ book, Deep Survival. In it he describes an experiment in which subjects were asked to count the number of times a basketball team made passes (threw the ball to each other). While the game was in progress and the subjects were counting passes, the experimenters sent a person in a gorilla suit right through the court in the midst of the players. When the subjects were interviewed later, they were asked “Did you see the gorilla?” The answer was invariably, “What gorilla?” The subjects didn’t see the gorilla because their minds were busy doing the task at hand – counting passes (or maybe it was dribbles, I forget). The explanation is that our minds have a limited working set, and when we’re engaged in a task that we’ve set for ourselves we automatically filter out anything that we don’t expect to see.
OK Kevin, how long has that top banner on Cryptogon been Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam?
The irony is thick as Saddam was hanged at dawn this morning.
Now though I have no love for Saddam, my first thought was “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” in that the world’s #1 witness against the USA’s greatest war criminals (Reagan, Bush I, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush II, etc.) has been executed following a sham trial, while the real perps should be swinging by their necks alongside him.
My second reaction was this was a Christmas gift to brainwashed Uh-mericunz.
Second reaction led to the epiphany, and applied the old maxim: “follow the money.”
The dollar has been diving fast, and nothing like the execution of a useful idiot to keep the focus off the next 3 days of economic navel-gazing and finacial spin.
Saddam could have been killed off countless ways by now, if it was only to protect the USA’s top war criminals. One need only ask the right questions. Follow the money…keep the braindead investors (AKA suckers) in the rigged game just a little longer…
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