Blindness of Change

Title: Blindness of Change
Date: September 24, 2010
Class: Theory of Knowledge
Category: In Class

            I never noticed how oblivious we are to change in our lives. When we think about it, it seems very easy to recognize change; however, experiments show that we usually don’t recognize changes even if they are as drastic as changing the person who you are speaking to. In class, we watched a couple of Youtube videos so we could actually see this as being the case. We watched a video where we saw the color of the cards changing along with many other changes. However, the majority of the class only recognized the color change in the cards when there was a drastic change in the clothes the people were wearing, the table cloth on the table, and the backdrop. Blindness of change occurs when we focus on one particular subject and so we miss the other changes going around us. People normally focus selectively and cannot pay attention to many things at once. This is why most of us could only detect one change in the video, because we were focusing on this one change rather than the whole.

            Why is this true when we are able to perceive in eight different ways (visual perception, olfactory perception, cutaneous perception, gustatory perception, auditory perception, kinesthetic perception, vestibular perception, and organic perception)? Shouldn’t we be able to recognize changes simultaneously as we have so many ways of taking in information about our surroundings? What traits determine what change we are able to recognize? If a person who we are talking to changes, is it the change in the person’s clothes that I notice? Or the change in similar traits I shared with the person being swapped? The person’s gender? The body shape?

 What if our senses actually recognize these various changes but we are just not aware of it because our brain is only capable of processing one data at a time? Does this mean that people who claim that they are able to multitask is fooling themselves? Do they say they are able to multitask as an excuse to do what they do for fun, at the same time as doing work?

What if people notice the change, but they are really just scared of the rest of the world disagreeing with them? And so they decide to remain quiet as if they did not notice the change like the others. If this is the case, are people just fooling themselves into thinking that we are only able to focus on one thing at a time? Perhaps in our previous generations, people were able to multitask, but after we began to believe we were only able to focus selectively, perhaps this became a habit and thus now, we believe we are not able to recognize different changes at the same time. Are we really only able to focus on one subject? Or is this just a belief? Will we ever know?

For related videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pklq0bXUaA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDLLf_WCyZ4