Now you see it

Faris Yakob posts a video illustrating change blindness - the failure to notice massive changes within our visual field, particularly if vision is briefly disrupted or if the changes are secondary to our point of focus.

You can see a real-world example in mentalist/magician Derren Brown’s re-enactment of the door experiment (pdf) referenced in his post. Seems amazing but as Faris explains:

Actually, it’s not amazing at all, because this is how perception works: making sense of visual data is an act of filtering out unimportant information. The amount of raw information firing into your visual cortex is incomprehensible. In this context, our brains decide what the person looks like is irrelevant - they key thing is the directions.

Perception is not reality. But even the stuff you filter out is going somewhere. I was reminded of another Brown stunt played at the expense of some advertising folk:

Subliminal suggestion is interesting, sure. More so is the idea that these two guys could probably give you perfectly good reasons as to why they came up with the poster they did. Well-established psychological territory, but more to come in a follow-up post. Still sorting some things out in my head.