Emotion may help the visual system jump the gun to predict what the brain will see

[Fumesucker]

This, to me, is a fascinating article on how our emotional state modifies our perceptions.



http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/46348/title/What_do_you_see%3F

By Jenny Lauren Lee
August 29th, 2009; Vol.176 #5

<snip>

Studies show that the brain guesses the identity of objects before it has finished processing all the sensory information collected by the eyes. And now there is evidence that how you feel may play a part in this guessing game. A number of recent studies show that these two phenomena — the formation of an expectation about what one will see based on context and the visual precedence that emotions give to certain objects — may be related. In fact, they may be inseparable.

New evidence suggests that the brain uses “affect” (pronounced AFF-ect) — a concept researchers use to talk about emotion in a cleaner, more clearly defined way — not only to tell whether an object is important enough to merit further attention, but also to see that object in the first place.

“The idea here is not that if we both see someone smile we would interpret it differently,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett 
of Boston College. “It’s that you might see the smile and I might completely miss it.” Barrett and Moshe Bar of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston outline this rather unexpected idea in the May 12 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

<snip>

More at the link..

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Thanks for posting this.

[pnwmom]

2. Thank you. It makes perfect sense.

We know that a big skill in reading is predicting what word/s might be coming next. It's not surprising that the rest of our visual system works the same way -- but it's always interesting to read about the science.

[RandomThoughts]

3. Great article.

Although I would also add a spiritual context to it.


There is another point.

“You enter a new scene, and there are vast amounts of information to analyze,” Bar says. “Now you’re drinking from a fire hydrant.” People need something to tell them what is important

That is the pipe from the subconscious to the conscious, if you widen that pipe you reach a state that is similar to a schizoid or insane attitude, because things irrelevant are seen at the same importance of relevance. The same effect happens with LSD, but you lose the conscious minds ability to process, so it is debilitating but still has fascination with some people. I think such drugs are bad.

Many prescribed drugs thin the pipe to stymie imagination, that can be bad also.

But if you widen the pipe from subconscious to conscious you have a bigger choice of what something might be or mean.

So lets say you see something with a coffee cup, and the coffee cup has little value in the viewers eyes because it is not important. You can prime the coffee cup with previous indications of the cup or speaking of the cup, then when the image is seen, the fact that the narrow pipe viewer has activity in coffee cup part of mind, that part of the image with the coffee cup becomes seen through their pipe. Associations to words like Socialism work like that.

Welcome to targeted marketing and mind control used by many sectors.

The only way I can see to combat that is for people to learn, and part of that is for them to widen their pipe. In the media environment of today too many can be debilitated intentionally so the pipe stream control has to be moved from subconscious to conscious mind. Also the use of things that enter the subconscious without people knowing it, subliminal, are so rampant that part of the control has to be moved from subconscious to conscious mind.

Although a wide pipe has its disadvantaged, you have to have a disciplined mind to discern reality from illusion, basically moving the subconscious selection from a small pipe that most people have into the conscious mind of deciding what is relevant.

Enter the spiritual...

Crazy people were thought to see the spirit world better in many cultures, and I think the spirit world has a mist or a translucent layer on things, so when you only see the thin pipe you never see the spiritual significance of events.

If you have a spirit that is bad, it will guide you to pick parts of the stream through the pipe that does its work by scaring or making you angry. If you have a good spirit it will find the better parts of the stream through the pipe and make those parts more relevant. So if someone holds up something some will see a bat, some a butterfly, in the spiritual context it is not just past association but also what kind of way you think. Do you think in meanness or kindness spirit.

Also the more you look with one mind set, the more that mind set is all you see, so people or cultures can spiral into small worlds were they only see a very small fraction of reality.

So in the spirit way of looking at things, the gauge and selector of information on the pipe is your spirit, and when that is moved from subconscious to conscious you can think on the spirit more. Then you can actually recognize if the thought from seeing something is good or bad, if it will help or hurt people. So realizing there is a spirit context to how people perceive things helps them learn that they need to discern to avoid the spiritual interpretations of hate and anger, and find the spirit of goodness. Or that is part of how I see it. If a person does not know they are getting there information filtered through an input output filter, they can not choose to ignore or embrace it. They just follow what they are guided by whatever type of spirit they chose to allow their filter to be.

Glenn Beck's and the crazy right rantings are the cause of a selective stream through their pipe to match a spirit or emotion. By widening that pipe you get Glenn making crazy connections, because he is only making the connection based on his emotion or spirit, not also a conscious thought of other streams in the pipe. If he also thought, he could see that he is choosing streams of very low probability to connect dots only vaguely connected. And he does that because that is what he wants to find(although he might know what he is doing, and only doing it to prime the thin pipe of his listeners to see what he wants them to see, targeted thought control and manipulation) Or he might just be doing it without knowing what he is doing. In that case he does have a fat pipe, but not a conscious knowledge of what is happening so that he can ignore the wrong stuff, by thinking. Does he ask if it is it moral and good, and is it rational? He may ask and not care, or he might be being guided by what spirit he has without knowing what he is doing.

Also many tv shows prime the thin pipe, by having subtle indications of what they want people to think, maybe in a story line in many wrestling programs, or slight modifications of news stories, or showing how people should act in society by example, reality shows, Jerry Springer, or sitcoms with weak role models. These things can modify people, and can change what they get through their thin pipe from their subconscious. In a spiritual sense, it can be seen as adding fear or hate, or telling people who they have to follow or what is important to get that spirit to guide what stream comes up out of their pipe. Materialism and commercialism are examples of pointing the flow of a thin pipe to believe in money first.

I try and recognize these things, but I do not line things up or make all of the connections. Many of you may have noticed the strings of information that just appear. I don't precomputed or set up strings, the things just appear when needed. So in my view they are being done by a higher power. But you can clearly see how different parts of the image are highlighted by both temporal and string context. It is also not a manipulation of things I read or see to create a context to think on, although I see that attempt being done many times.

I really believe it is a spiritual phenomenon since I do not always springboard off of contextual thought of other people. Although sometimes their can be a connected chain of spring boarding to lead to a view.

I miss many of the thoughts on many posts, some of the things other people see, I will not see. So at times I do underline the part of the post with an indicator to prime the part it matches. Things like Shatner shoulder roll are part of that, but since the pieces just fall in place, or just play, I don't think it is about me at all, nor about Shatner of coarse.

I could tell stories of chains of events, as could other people, that are really long and so well orchestrated for one message that it is obviously supernatural. Many people have spoken about how adversity in their lives directly prepared them for a challenge, I think of the chain of events being like that. Like we have something guiding us giving us the strength to handle challenges, some supernatural thing knows we will have to stand against some bad thing some day and prepares us for it. I see that as the same thing as chains or strings.


Edit: My intent is to only try and explain how I see information that moves from one person to another. And how the spirit of that information influences other people. In many times it is really good, I have seen many comercials and TV that are also really good, and I am at times even too tough on Glenn, but he does seem to take uncorraltated things and try to link them. I do realize that same could be said about posting music clips, but that is where it is not about the items but how people choose to view them and what parts they chose to learn from them. If anything it is saying people should think and feel also, and decide for themselves. So what information in the items do you agree with, what does an individual feel and think is correct.