Seeing
Seeing (Visual Abstracting)
On this and the following pages, we present a variety of images, media files, and articles that illustrate different aspects of abstracting and evaluating.
Take care to note your reactions to the images and videos seen below in your Personal Journal or in the Ongoing Course Discussion.
1. Visualizing Abstracting
Used/published with permission of the artist, Paul Dennithorne Johnston.
2. Benham Disc
This 3-minute video has no sound.
If you have trouble viewing YouTube videos, try this as an alternative:
benham-new.mp4 Download benham-new.mp4
3. Vision Explained
From the Charlie Rose Brain Series (Da Cunha, 2009a), Dr. Eric Kandel and the panel explain how the visual system works, without using the word abstracting, but they summarize in detail the abstracting process that Korzybski articulated.
If you have trouble viewing YouTube videos, try this as an alternative:
CRose-visAbstracting-all.mp4 Download CRose-visAbstracting-all.mp4
4. Vision Confusion
Also from the Charlie Rose Brain Series ((Da Cunha, 2009a), these examples illustrate how our eyes-brain-visual-system is not a perfect recorder of how we convert our "out there" sensations into "in here" sensory experiences.
In some cases, our brains have been trained to interpret certain visual stimuli in very specific, and sometimes misleading, ways. In other cases we can recognize certain images (such as faces) with very sketchy and ambiguous inputs.
In other words, the result of what we abstract is not the same as the object of what we are abstracting.
If you have trouble viewing YouTube videos, try this as an alternative:
Crose-visAbstracting-demos.mp4 Download Crose-visAbstracting-demos.mp4
5. Seeing what's not there
Too often we tend to think of the abstracting process only in terms of a reducing filter, selecting and rejecting the sensory stimuli. We forget or overlook a key part of the process - even at the neurological level, our brains have to make inferences and guesses as they try to make sense of what we sense. As demonstrated with the Benham disc, sometimes what the brain constructs and reports is only a rough approximation of the 'territory.'
Here is another example. Can you count the black dots in this image?
Dimples and Bumps
As one illustration of these visual abstracing principles, look at the following image. This image includes what might be considered as “dimples” which appear to recede into the image, and “bumps” which appear to come out of the image. How many “dimples” and how many “bumps” do you see?
Now rotate it 180 degrees. How many "dimples" and how many "bumps" do you see from this perspective? (It's the same image, just turned upside-down.)
Dimples and Bumps in the 'Real World'
The two photographs below were grabbed from this story on CNET.com Links to an external site.. Each depicts a satellite image as it was shown in the article, paired with the same photo rotated 180 degrees. What differences do you see, based on the orientation of the photo, with respect to relative height? Is the Citadel of Aleppo on a hill or in a crater? Is the Colorado River elevated above its surrounding terrain or at the bottom of a canyon?
Citadel of Aleppo, Syria
Colorado River, United States