Article in SciAm

Quoted message said:

As posted on rec.bicycles.misc

<url:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000A011D-C17F-101E-B40D83

414B7F0000&pageNumber=1>

This was on a TV programme not that long ago.

Cheers, helen s

--This is an invalid email address to avoid spam-- to get correct one remove dependency on fame &
fortune h*$el*$$e**nd***$o$ts***i*$*$m**m$$o*n**s@$*$a$$o**l.c**$*$om$$

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 11:00:29 +0000,

Just zis Guy said:

As posted on rec.bicycles.misc

<url:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000A011D-C17F-101E-B40D83414B7F0000&pageNumber=1>

Scary! But this, of course, doesn't apply to motorists who are trained.

Quoted message said:

Guy
===

^^^ This should be "-- " (dash dash space)

--
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = - @B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.

tjw.hn.orgtjw.hn.orgOpen ↗ locofungus.btinternet.co.uklocofungus.btinternet.co.ukOpen ↗

Tim Woodall said:

you know? said:

As posted on rec.bicycles.misc

<url:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000A011D-C17F-101E-B40D83414B7 F0000&pageNumber=1>

Quoted message said:

Scary! But this, of course, doesn't apply to motorists who are trained.

..or of course to people on bikes at all

Tony

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 11:30:19 +0000 (UTC), Tim Woodall
<[email hidden]> wrote in message
<[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Guy
===

^^^ This should be "-- " (dash dash space)

No it shouldn't. It's a double-underline not a sig separator.

Guy
===
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
chapmancentral.demon.co.ukchapmancentral.demon.co.ukOpen ↗

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

Reply to Just zis Guy, you know?

Michael Shermer was a professional racing cyclist; in his book "Why People Believe Weird Things", he
describes hallucinating an alien abduction when he was competing in the Race Across America, an
event he described as "a rolling experiment on stress, sleep deprivation and mental breakdown".

--
Mark, UK. Nobody can be lucky all the time; so when your luck deserts you in some fashion don't
think you've been abandoned in your prime but rather that you're saving up your ration.

With blatent disregard for copyright laws:

None So Blind Perceptual-blindness experiments challenge the validity of eyewitness testimony and
the metaphor of memory as a video recording By Michael Shermer

url:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000A011D-C17F-101E-B40D83414B7F00 00&pageNumber=1

Picture yourself watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each. One team wears
white shirts and the other black shirts, and the members move around one another in a small room
tossing two basketballs. Your task is to count the number of passes made by the white team--not easy
given the weaving movement of the players. Unexpectedly, after 35 seconds a gorilla enters the room,
walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps his chest and, nine seconds later, exits. Would
you see the gorilla? Most of us believe we would. In fact, 50 percent of subjects in this remarkable
experiment by Daniel J. Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher F. Chabris of Harvard
University did not see the gorilla, even when asked if they noticed anything unusual (see their
paper "Gorillas in Our Midst" at viscog.beckman.uiuc.edudjsOpen ↗ lab/). The effect is called
inattentional blindness. When attending to one task--say, talking on a cell phone while driving--
many of us become blind to dynamic events, such as a gorilla in the crosswalk.

I've incorporated the gorilla video into my lecture on science and skepticism given at universities
around the country. I always ask for a show of hands of those who did not see the gorilla during the
first viewing. About half of the more than 10,000 students I encountered last year confessed their
perceptual blindness. Many were stunned, accusing me of showing two different clips. Simons had the
same experience: "We actually rewound the videotape to make sure subjects knew we were showing them
the same clip."

These experiments reveal our perceptual vainglory, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of how
the brain works. We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled
with sensory inputs. Memory, in this model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the
theater of the mind, in which some cortical commander watches the show and reports to a higher
homunculus what it saw.

This is not the case. The perceptual system and the brain that analyzes its data are far more
complex. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain that is
focused on something else. "The mistaken belief that important events will automatically draw
attention is exactly why these findings are surprising; it is also what gives them some practical
implications," Simons told me. "By taking for granted that unexpected events will be seen, people
often are not as vigilant as they could be in actively anticipating such events."

Driving is an example. "Many accident reports include claims like, 'I looked right there and never
saw them,'" Simons notes. "Motorcyclists and bicyclists are often the victims in such cases. One
explanation is that car drivers expect other cars but not bikes, so even if they look right at the
bike, they sometimes might not see it." Simons recounts a study by NASA research scientist Richard
F. Haines of pilots who were attempting to land a plane in a simulator with the critical flight
information superimposed on the windshield. "Under these conditions, some pilots failed to notice
that a plane on the ground was blocking their path."

Over the years in this column I have pounded paranormalists pretty hard, so they may rightly point
to these studies and accuse me of inattentional blindness when it comes to ESP and other perceptual
ephemera. Perhaps my attention to what is known in science blinds me to the unknown.

Maybe. But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is
no longer constrained by the price of paper. I may be perceptually blind, but not all scientists
will be, and out of this fact arises the possibility of new percepts and paradigms. There may be
none so blind as those who will not see, but in science there are always those whose vision is not
so constrained. But first they must convince the skeptics, and we are trained to look for gorillas
in our midst.

In article <[email hidden]>,

Just zis Guy said:

As posted on rec.bicycles.misc

How about some kind of summary - at least what it's about - when you post a link?

--
Nick Kew

"Nick Kew" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
"]news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>, "Just zis Guy, you know?"

Quoted message said:

As posted on rec.bicycles.misc

How about some kind of summary - at least what it's about - when you post a link?

Its about not being able to see the seemingly obvious. In this case (for a scientific study) a man
in a gorilla suit in the audience of a basketball match.

Not the slightest surprise to me, I've had a pedestrian seemingly staring in my direction that
obviously had not seen me at all.

W K said:

Its about not being able to see the seemingly obvious. In this case (for a scientific study) a man
in a gorilla suit in the audience of a basketball match.

Not the slightest surprise to me, I've had a pedestrian seemingly staring in my direction that
obviously had not seen me at all.

I suspect that it is not quite what it seems. The audience were being asked to concentrate on a
specific, not easy, task of counting the number of passes. The gorilla walking through was not
important. Think of the cinema when you are engrossed and someone walks in front of you. You don't
bother at all with who they are or what they look like, you just try and move to be able to continue
viewing the screen. I bet though that if the gorilla had made steps towards a member of the audience
they would have noticed it as it started to become relevant as a possible threat. Otherwise it would
be ignored as an irrelevant distraction.

Just my $0.02

Tony

Tony Raven said:

W K wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Its about not being able to see the seemingly obvious. In this case (for a scientific study) a
man in a gorilla suit in the audience of a basketball match.

Not the slightest surprise to me, I've had a pedestrian seemingly staring in my direction that
obviously had not seen me at all.

Quoted message said:

I suspect that it is not quite what it seems. The audience were being asked to concentrate on a
specific, not easy, task of counting the number of passes. The gorilla walking through was not
important. Think of the cinema when you are engrossed and someone walks in front of you. You don't
bother at all with who they are or what they look like, you just try and move to be able to
continue viewing the screen. I bet though that if the gorilla had made steps towards a member of
the audience they would have noticed it as it started to become relevant as a possible threat.
Otherwise it would be ignored as an irrelevant distraction.

Exactly. Cyclists don't threaten cars. An irrelevant distraction to the serious business
of motoring.

--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
["]http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]