Chat with a Visual Neuroanatomist
I met a guy at a party last night who is a Visual Neuroscientist, so of course I had to ask him about the visual questions I've had lately.
Now, 10 hours later I get to try to reproduce what he had said from memory. So take it all with a grain of salt.
To his knowledge there has been no study to determine whether or not women use their periphrial vision more so than men. It's used about the same on everyone, and even should someone spread their attention out to focus more on the periphrial, it would take away from the frontal because attention is finite, and you lose the detail from where your attention is not.
Also, there is almost no point in paying attention to the periphrial because of the minds short cutting ability. As you sit here and read this, and you focus your attention on your periphrial, that stuff on the side, is for the most part, valueless once you've percieved. The brain doesn't need to remember it's there unless there is a change in it's state. However, putting a bulk of your attention on your periphrial may not be wise, because the periphrial is notorious of being unreliable in terms of anything other than motion. It's not equipped for details and often fills in information which does not exist, as evidenced by this Rotational illusion.
I proceeded to tell this gentleman that when I spread my attention out to include the periphery that it gave me a long forgotten feeling of psychedellia, and he understood what I was talking about, but that of course he didn't recommend taking acid (which wasn't what I was suggesting. It made me think of this: The God Module.
Then our conversation was interrupted and that was that. Since he believes there is no difference in gender perception, I couldn't ask how that could relate to cognition and gender based world interior/exterior world perception based on visual input. So I have questions that may go beyond Science's current ability to answer because there are many levels of cognition from basic shape perception, to the problem of stitching together a cognizant visual world from segmented object input (the "Segmentation Problem"), to the interplay at the higher levels of consciousness. There is a lot we don't know about the brain, so there you go.
Now, 10 hours later I get to try to reproduce what he had said from memory. So take it all with a grain of salt.
To his knowledge there has been no study to determine whether or not women use their periphrial vision more so than men. It's used about the same on everyone, and even should someone spread their attention out to focus more on the periphrial, it would take away from the frontal because attention is finite, and you lose the detail from where your attention is not.
Also, there is almost no point in paying attention to the periphrial because of the minds short cutting ability. As you sit here and read this, and you focus your attention on your periphrial, that stuff on the side, is for the most part, valueless once you've percieved. The brain doesn't need to remember it's there unless there is a change in it's state. However, putting a bulk of your attention on your periphrial may not be wise, because the periphrial is notorious of being unreliable in terms of anything other than motion. It's not equipped for details and often fills in information which does not exist, as evidenced by this Rotational illusion.
I proceeded to tell this gentleman that when I spread my attention out to include the periphery that it gave me a long forgotten feeling of psychedellia, and he understood what I was talking about, but that of course he didn't recommend taking acid (which wasn't what I was suggesting. It made me think of this: The God Module.
Then our conversation was interrupted and that was that. Since he believes there is no difference in gender perception, I couldn't ask how that could relate to cognition and gender based world interior/exterior world perception based on visual input. So I have questions that may go beyond Science's current ability to answer because there are many levels of cognition from basic shape perception, to the problem of stitching together a cognizant visual world from segmented object input (the "Segmentation Problem"), to the interplay at the higher levels of consciousness. There is a lot we don't know about the brain, so there you go.
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