Douglas Purdy

Who is the Buddha that makes the grass green?

with one comment

Apparently you are…

“Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.”

Via Marginal Revolution

June 26th, 2008 at 4:44 pm

Posted in Random

One Response to 'Who is the Buddha that makes the grass green?'

Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'Who is the Buddha that makes the grass green?'.

  1. You betcha. Imagine (this example is I think originally Gregory’s though I read about it in a book by Dennett) that you are standing in a room wallpapered by lots of copies of a picture of Marilyn Monroe. If you have normal vision, it *seems* to you that you see all the MM pictures simultaneously, that you *perceive* a tessellation of the walls of the room by MM pictures.

    But that cannot be. You can only focus on a small number of them, the ones directly in front of your fovea, at any one time. Your eyes are constantly moving, to be sure, so you are constantly cross-checking that all the MM pictures are actually still there, but if some of them changed into a vaguely similar picture while you weren’t looking at them, there is about a 50% chance that *you wouldn’t notice*.

    John Cowan

    26 Jun 08 at 20:20

Leave a Reply