In the Science Times today, Natalie Angier does a decent job describing how the brain conserves resources by schematizing visual input. We do not notice small changes unless they demand our attention or we make a special effort to attend to changes. New data that does not reach the threshold of change is simply ignored or fit into the pre-existing schema.
Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face
The mechanisms that succeed in seizing our sightline fall into two basic classes: bottom up and top down. Bottom-up attentiveness originates with the stimulus, with something in our visual field that is the optical equivalent of a shout: a wildly waving hand, a bright red object against a green field. Bottom-up stimuli seem to head straight for the brainstem and are almost impossible to ignore, said Nancy Kanwisher, a vision researcher at M.I.T., and thus they are popular in Internet ads.
Top-down attentiveness, by comparison, is a volitional act, the decision by the viewer that an item, even in the absence of flapping parts or strobe lights, is nonetheless a sight to behold...
Recent studies with both macaques and humans indicate that attentiveness crackles through the brain along vast, multifocal, transcortical loops, leaping to life in regions at the back of the brain, in the primary visual cortex that engages with the world, proceeding forward into frontal lobes where higher cognitive analysis occurs, and then doubling back to the primary visual centers. En route, the initial signal is amplified, italicized and annotated, and so persuasively that the boosted signal seems to emanate from the object itself... [Emphasis mine-SW]
Whether lured into attentiveness by a bottom-up or top-down mechanism, scientists said, the results of change blindness studies and other experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time, and that anything lying outside a given moment’s cone of interest gets short shrift. The brain, it seems, is a master at filling gaps and making do, of compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.
The emphasized section makes the point that the conservative nature of the visual system is not merely a metaphor for the greater conservatism of the brain and mind overall, but a microcosm of how the brain conserves resources when confronting a difficult to understand world. It is one of the reasons that it is so hard for people to change. They have models of the world, paradigms, that resist change. It requires sustained attention and psychic work to question one's assumptions and question the paradigm rather than simply ignore new data or fit the new data into the old system.
A crack in the paradigm appears elsewhere in the New York Times today, on the front page, in an article by Steve Erlanger, a long time corespondent in Israel who has been extremely sympathetic to, and often verging on being an apologist for, the Palestinians.
Erlanger seems to have just noted that Hamas’s Insults to Jews Complicate Peace Effort:
At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.
Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.
Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.
Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.
I assume it was an editor, one of those layers of editing that makes the MSM the paragon of objectivity that we know it to be, who changed "incitement" to "insults", but at least Erlanger reports on what he sees and does not try to minimize it, though he does make an effort to contrast Fatah as more moderate. Fatah's moderation compared to Hamas is similar to the John Birch Society's moderation compared to the KKK.
Soccer Dad points out that the vile insults and genocidal incitement noted by Erlanger are nothing new and expresses some displeasure with the article's seeming diffidence when it comes to Fatah:
While I'm glad to see the NY Times cover this topic, there's little new here that someone with an internet connection and an interest in the topic wouldn't be able find out on his own. Palestinian incitement should have been on the agenda of all news organization over the past 15 years. That it is so rarely covered reflects poorly on the Jerusalem based correspondents.
Still the article disappoints as it appears to be an effort to whitewash Fatah and show Hamas as the major problem.
What Erlanger leaves out is that the Palestinians by and large support the platforms of Hamas and Fatah that are based on destroying Israel and killing Jews. Further, he does not yet see the sad truth that terrorism works and genocidal hatred have been consistently rewarded in the Middle East. The international community has bestowed billions of dollars annually on the Palestinians and the world has begged them to have a state. They have eschewed a state because they have become trapped in their own paradigm, a paradigm that involves extreme anti-Semitism and the fantasy of regaining their lost Utopian lands, but that is a discussion for another time.
It is a positive occurrence that Steve Erlanger, a man who in the recent past had great difficulty "seeing" Palestinian hatred as a fact, let alone a problem, has taken note of a reality that makes peace impossible. We can only hope that his vision will continue to clear and that his increasing clarity will be shared by our global MSM, those who still act as our primary visual system.
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