
What Little Babies See That We No Longer Can - walterbell
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/what-little-babies-see-that-you-no-longer-can/
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Vivtek
Now here's an interesting little tidbit. I'm deuteronopic colorblind and I've
always had troubles with color identification under odd lighting. I have no
idea which of the blocks in the top two pictures are supposed to be red
(several candidate colors could possibly fit the bill), but if I go by the
text that says that the red ones are actually purple in one picture and orange
in the other, I can tell which ones must be red.

Apparently I haven't lost the distinction that babies are supposed to lose at
five months, because I lack some information the rest of you are getting.

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mcv
What was your opinion on the dress? Blue/black or white/gold?

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Vivtek
Blue/black. I never could see the white/gold.

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mcv
Understandable. The white/gold is caused by misinterpreting the lighting. I've
seen it as white/gold on one site and blue/black on another, just because of
the different colours the site had around the photo. It's really interesting
to experience what context does to your perception, and it also underscores
just how unreliable and subjective our perception really is. Well, yours is
less so, apparently.

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qewrffewqwfqew
The more I look at the three snails, the more I find A and C to be similar in
their pattern of illumination.

EDIT: the closer I look the more I'm convinced. C is the matte rendering of A;
B is the different environment map. Figure 2 in the paper bears me out; I
think the authors managed to fool themselves while editing :(.

EDIT#2: make that figure 2A & 2B that bear me out ... 2C they seem to have
used the same image twice in the bottom row. Am I mad? I know these errors are
easy to make in the rush to publication, but my senses disagreeing with the
text in so many places is starting to freak me out!

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tominous
I came here to make the same comment. Overlaying the images with crossed eyes,
you can easily see that snails A and C share the most similar pixels. The
mistake is in Figure 1 of the original paper and has been copied to the
article.

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GregBuchholz
There is a very interesting learn-to-draw book, "Drawing on the Right Side of
the Brain", which takes a similar tack. Its premise is the reason people find
drawing realistic scenes hard is because your mind is busy categorizing what
it sees in to nice big-picture abstractions like "house" or "eye". You need to
re-focus you mind to be able to see what is in front of you (how the lines
converge, how shading affects shape, etc.), and once you do that, it becomes
easy to draw in a realistic style, and not have your drawings come out like
they did when you were 8 years old. Some of the exercises in the book are to
copy line drawings that are turned upside down. This is so that it is easier
for your mind to ignore the high level concepts, and just be able to copy down
the lines as they are. I was certainly impressed and I wouldn't have guessed
that by reading just one book and working the exercises I could have learned
to draw so well. Highly recommended.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of...](https://www.google.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain)

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+"drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain")

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mycroft-holmes
On a throwaway account here. I'm currently teaching myself to draw using that
book and I think the author is really onto something.

My first experience with psilocybin is also something that led me down a
similar line of thinking. When the drug really hit me and I looked at anything
visually appealing (a painting or a movie) all I could think was, "So this is
how a kid sees the world!" A tree (I still knew it was a tree deep down) just
looked different. I saw all the little parts that made up a tree. There was no
longer a filter to intervene and say, "Yeah that's a tree. You've seen a
million." It was like my brain did a revert to its state years ago and it was
_amazing_.

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evincarofautumn
Yeah, I’ve taken mushrooms, and my memories of being a young child are in
retrospect very psychedelic, minus the visuals. (I imagine visuals _are_
present at very young ages, say 0–1 years, before you learn how to fully
separate your senses.) You take things at face value, it’s easy to lose
context and permanence, you draw connections between things, and you feel
insightful.

For example, I remember being about 3 years old, and realising that other
people couldn’t hear my thoughts, and that I couldn’t hear theirs—it was mind-
blowing. Of course, you tend to come to slightly more complex realisations
while taking psychedelics as an adult, and therein lies the value: it’s a kind
of renewal of your personality.

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kristopolous
This is kinda the same thing as the himbu experiments - about how language and
cultural taxonomy cause us to bucket things and then compare them on higher
order dimensions.

With practice, you can turn this mechanism off and with sufficient focus and
sincerity of purpose, see things without such taxonomy.

The extension of this exercise is when you are able to reconstitute things in
different ways without necessarily any known categorical words.

De then re pattern things.

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aaron695
I think you'll find "language and cultural taxonomy cause us to bucket things"
is mostly/all bunk.

The whole Eskimos have xxx words for snow BS goes along these lines as well.

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970)

~~~
kristopolous
Are you making a counter claim that every language has the exact same number
of words split the exact same way and that cultural context has absolutely
zero bearing whatsoever in how events are seen or interpreted?

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aaron695
Yep. The essence in what you said.

Languages have different amount for the words snow, but it's not relevant to
time in the environment AFAIK.

As long as you have snow, you'll be exposed to all forms hence similar amounts
of names. England or Arctic. The increased exposure for the Inuit does not
make for more words.

> cultural context has absolutely zero bearing whatsoever in how events are
> seen or interpreted.

As long as seen means by sight, and interpreted means lower level brain. And
by zero you mean insignificant (Or way way less than these theories state.

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david927
I think if you research it more, you'll be surprised.

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aaron695
Universalism vs relativism.

What makes logical sense?

Language is used to describe the world around us seems very logical to me, it
came second for starters.

If you want to go the other way, language shapes the world around us, actual
evidence is needed for me.

It is full of "just so stories" which I find troubling. It's a meme that can
spread without proper evidence beating a boring "language just describes
things".

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alanwatts
>The baby looks at things all day without winking; that is because his eyes
are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is
going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself within
the surroundings and moves along with it. These are the principles of mental
hygiene.

-Chuang Tzu

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salimmadjd
I wonder what impact this will have in creating toys for babies in that age
range. Even if for marketing optics.

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digitalengineer
None what so ever, as it is the parents who purchase the toys... They won't
notice any difference.

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sleepychu
With the right branding, dog owners by balls that they know their dogs can
see.

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undersuit
That and DOGTV.

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baseraid
It's weird to call it an ability of babies to perform well in a very contrived
task, but perform worse in any real life object recognition.

It is the other way round. We adults have a great capability to identify
similar real life objects in various lighting conditions. Hints like the
reflections on the snail tell our brain about the lighting conditions and we
automatically correct for it.

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jerf
There's a bizarre but very fashionable form of self-loathing in which any way
in which we differ from someone else, it is automatically assumed that the
other thing is objectively superior. Do we, as adults, see one way but babies
see another? Babies see objectively better! Does another culture eat
differently than yours? Other culture is objectively better! Does the other
culture have different music, art, story structure preferences? The article
about how their way is objectively better than mine is already templated and
ready to go in the minds of people held in thrall by this fashion.

I have to warn you that once you start seeing this, you'll see it in a
surprisingly large number of places.

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tvanantwerp
Seems strange to phrase this as something that adults can no longer see. If
anything, it just shows that adult brains are more sophisticated in
interpreting visual information.

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dragonwriter
> Seems strange to phrase this as something that adults can no longer see.

Its factually accurate.

> If anything, it just shows that adult brains are more sophisticated in
> interpreting visual information.

"Interpreting" is mostly throwing out the parts that are less likely to be
relevant and keeping the parts that are more likely to be relevant. Obviously,
this is a good thing on balance, and nothing in the article suggests that it
is not.

It also involves not being able to as easily recognize certain difference
(which are less likely to be important in most practical cases, but
nevertheless are real differences.)

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known
They've no prejudice and they question every status quo;

