Seeing is a gift given to us by Mother Nature. Seeing is wonderful just because we can do it, can experience it. Healthy people cannot even imagine how it feels to be unable to observe the beauty of the world around us. Visual images are very easy to recognize and percept. But most people believe they are good in perception, while they are wrong. “When a conspicuous feature of a visual scene changes we normally notice. However, if that change occurs during a blink or saccade (large eye movement), or at the moment when a ‘mud splash’ appears or there is a cut in the film, we do not” (Blackmore 260).
Change blindness in visual perception is the phenomenon that happens when a person looking at the image when a person viewing a visual scene evidently turns out to be unable to notice large changes in the image. For change blindness to happen, the alteration in the scene usually has to coincide with some visual destruction such as an eye movement or a short obscuring of the scene or image observed by a person. When looking at immovable images, an observer can experience change blindness if even a large part of the image changes. Change blindness can be very tense when changes happen suddenly, and many spectators even did not manage to notice when a person they were talking to was by stealth displaced by another actor during the experiment. There are some slight differences between the problems of change blindness, it depends whether a person does not notice the change of the scene, or an observer does not remember the previous scene and thus, cannot recognize the change.
It might seem to us that we see the visual image of the surroundings sharply focused and in detail, but the experience of minutiae is a deception. According to this theory we do not even realize how things are perceived by people (Noë 53). The sudden information about the change blindness being more pervasive than before might have been enormous to inspire a n interest to the concept of change blindness (Ross 308). “Over the next few years, several laboratories independently began to produce evidence for change blindness, both for simple objects and for photographs of natural scenes. Perhaps the most important innovation was the realization that change blindness for natural scenes can occur in the absence of saccades” (Ross 309).
I accept Susan Blackmore’s arguing that while seeing our perception does not build up a detailed representation of the visual world, and that the visual world is all a grand illusion. I believe she is right, because the scenes we see are only images. These images are gathered together by our imagination. Every person perceives the visual scenes in different ways, as everyone possesses different experience, different ways of image perception. One and the same image or scene can be apprehended in diverse ways by different people (observers). Thus, the visual world is full of images comprehended by different individuals in diverse ways. The visual world is all a grand illusion.
Works Cited
Blackmore, J. Susan. Conversations on consciousness: what the best minds think about the brain, free will, and what it means to be human. Oxford University Press US, 2006.
Noë, Alva. Action in perception. Representation and mind. Bradford Books. MIT Press, 2004.
Ross, H. Brian, and David Irwin. Cognitive Vision: Psychology of Learning and Motivation.The Psychology of learning and motivation. Gulf Professional Publishing, 2003.