Where Your Eyes Are Leading

Where Your Eyes Are Leading
I've stated several times now, to people posting or linking to videos, that I don't do videos, can you post a transcript? I've yet to hear back from anyone in the affirmative. You see, I have a miserly tiny and slow connection and my time online is short, three to five hours per week. But even though you'd think I'm missing a whole lot, I really do not miss seeing the videos, just some of the information that might be presented.
I know we're all supposed to be such visually oriented people, yet I do not feel this is true. I feel we may have foolishly allowed ourselves to become more enthralled by visual media. For me, it does not seem a beneficial place to have your head. Yes, I know a single picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but even if that were true. It does not follow that the supposed equation scales up with a series of moving pictures.
Words involve the imagination, spoken or written, the listener or reader has to use their own imagination to construct form, meaning and intent from the words. Moving pictures impose their vision of an experience upon the viewer, your imagination is suppressed. Instead you draw comparisons and correlations with your own prior experience. It involves reacting instead of creating, evaluating response instead of entertaining notions. It's a different way of thinking that does not require comprehension or understanding in the way mere words do.
In the evolutionary sense, our eyesight is quite a new thing, all of our other nominal senses are much older. Taste, followed by Smell, and then Touch, next Hearing, and finally Sight. You can argue the order if you like, some do, positing single cells with "eyes" before all else. That doesn't fly or even crawl for me tho'.
Visual acuity is somewhat lacking, our eyes are easily deceived, a fact stage magicians have been exploiting for centuries. Modern visual wizards can deceive our sight with only thirty frames per second (twenty four for film). Eyewitness accounts are known as the least reliable kind of evidence. Accounts of the same event vary among witnesses much more wildly than can be ascribed to differing lines of sight.
When looking at a screen of moving images, you have already lost some discernment and choice in what you want to attend to. In the real world, something in your visual field has to rise above your perceptual threshold, you have to notice it and want to give it your attention. Then the images formed on your retina are converted into minute electrical signals. These are then passed through an electro-chemical network of neurons and synapses to the back of your brain, to the visual cortex. There the image is processed through more perceptual filters and re assembled by comparison with images in memory.
Yet "we" don't "see" until we retrieve the memory of what the visual cortex sent outwards. If we think visually, what we can see is limited to comparisons and correlations with what we've already seen. If we think aurally, that is, if we think about what we saw the way we think when we hear, what we can see is limited only by our imagination.
That, I feel is a beneficial place to have your head.
So the axiom is;
"Don't belive what you see is all, and listen to only some of what you hear".
or
"Stop watching TV, you'll rot your mind!".

Hear you later!

©02011 Cee Are