From ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2009) — Although we assume we can see everything in our field of vision, the brain actually picks and chooses the stimuli that come into our consciousness. A new study in the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology’s Journal of Vision reveals that our brains can be trained to consciously see stimuli that would normally be invisible.

Lead researcher Caspar Schwiedrzik from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Germany said the brain is an organ that continuously adapts to its environment and can be taught to improve visual perception.

“A question that had not been tackled until now was whether a hallmark of the human brain, namely its ability to produce conscious awareness, is also trainable,” Schwiedrzik said. “Our findings imply that there is no fixed border between things that we perceive and things that we do not perceive — that this border can be shifted.”

1.      Schwiedrzik et al. Sensitivity and perceptual awareness increase with practice in metacontrast masking. Journal of Vision, 2009; 9 (10): 1 DOI: [1] 10.1167/9.10.18

For full article, please click [2] here.

I have done a number of presentations on visual attention, perception and mindfulness. It never ceases to amaze audiences when they miss obvious stimuli, such as a unicycling clown, right in front of them.

There are many powerful exercises to demonstrate to audience members that their visual attention is a limited capacity. In other words, we are not consciously aware of everything that comes in through our five senses.

We miss a lot of ridiculously obvious things depending on what we are attempting to do with our attention. For instance, if we are focusing on looking for grammatical errors (proof-reading), we may miss contextual or factual errors. If we are in an angry mood, we look for information that perpetuates that anger.

 There is a great Frank & Ernest cartoon that provides a nice metaphor for this phenomenon.

‘ When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.’  To put it another way, when you’re angry, everything looks to reinforce that anger (via your perception of things).

The other extension of this is ‘When you’re a nail, everything looks like a hammer.’ That is, when you’re in a sad funk, everything you see seems to reinforce and extend that sad feeling or depressed mood.

Have a Thriving Thursday!  Just for today, don’t be a nail or a hammer. Chose to learn today. Opt to be optimistic!

Cheers,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.