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Neuroscience and illusion, More than meets the eye

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onesliceshort

Posted: Jun 14 2010, 06:38 PM

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Through Aldo's witness breakdown thread and upon further research by all, the alleged impact witnesses have been narrowed down to a select few who were actually in a position to witness both the plane and the facade of the Pentagon building.
In effect, the perps basically had to fool a small number of people into seeing this effect and not the hundreds/thousands that detractors continually quote.
Added to this was the barrage of authoritative figures telling us what happened.
A media brainwash of this repeated "information" and of course the "cover plane story", all used together to hammer home the point.
Remember, even Roosevelt Roberts described seeing a "second plane" in the parking lot after the explosion!

What detractors called a "magic trick" was actually a branch of neuroscientific research, brutally honed and experimented with in the concentration camps of Europe (abusers of which were brought to the USA after WW2)
Later these techniques were adopted by the US, in particular the CIA, for decades.
The MKUltra experiments come to mind and God knows what else.
Mind control is the preferred weapon of choice

The argument that the perps couldn't pull this off is even up for discussion is based on pure ignorance. They are ironically, victims of the area of neuroscience that they reduce to term "magic trick". Cognitive dissonance.

There is far more to it, but I have quoted these clips.

The Skeptic's Dictionary (2005)

QUOTE

Cognitive capture, also known as cognitive tunneling, is a phenomenon in which the observer is too focused on the instrumentation and not on the whole environment. For example, while driving, if the driver is focused on the speedometer and not on the road, he will be suffering from cognitive capture.

In visual perception, change blindness is the phenomenon that occurs when a person viewing a visual scene apparently fails to detect large changes in the scene. For change blindness to occur, the change in the scene typically has to coincide with some visual disruption such as a saccade (eye movement) or a brief
obscuration of the observed scene or image. When looking at still images, a viewer can experience change blindness if part of the image changes.

Change blindness can be particularly dramatic when changes occur unexpectedly, with many observers even failing to notice when a person they were talking to was surreptitiously replaced by a different actor (Simons & Levin, 1998). Change blindness has now been shown to occur with a wide variety of visual disruptions (e.g., blinks, transient noise flashed on a display, etc).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness

QUOTE

Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to see things that are actually there. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental
distractions. The phenomenon is due to how our minds see and process information. Closely related to the subject of change blindness, it is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited
capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time.
Any otherwise salient feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention.

QUOTE

Inattentional blindness is exploited by illusionists in the presentation of "magic shows" in the performance of some tricks by focusing the audience attention upon some distractive element, away from elements of the scene under manipulation by the performer. This is called misdirection amongst magicians. A good example is Derren Brown who repeats several of the original change blindness experiments, including the person change trick, where someone is asked to give directions to a 'lost' tourist clutching a map (conducted by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin). Something like a door or a large object is passed between them by some workmen. When the door or object has gone past, the person who is asking for directions and clutching the map has changed. In the original experiments, about 50% of people didn't notice this.

Watch this guy in action. He takes the experiment on video above to the extreme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBPG_OBgTWg

http://www.mindscience.org/news/articles/s...pennteller.html

QUOTE

Magicians are, first and foremost, artists of attention and awareness. They manipulate the focus and intensity of human attention, controlling, at any given instant, what we are aware of and what we are not. They do so in part by employing bewildering combinations of visual illusions (such as afterimages),
optical illusions (smoke and mirrors), special effects (explosions, fake gunshots, precisely timed lighting controls), sleight of hand, secret devices and mechanical artifacts (�gimmicks�).

But the most versatile instrument in their bag of tricks may be the ability to create cognitive illusions. Like visual illusions, cognitive illusions mask the perception of physical reality. Yet unlike visual illusions, cognitive illusions are not sensory in nature. Rather they involve high-level functions such as attention, memory and causal inference. With all those tools at their disposal, well-practiced magicians make it virtually impossible to follow the physics of what is actually happening�leaving the impression that the only explanation for the events is magic.

By applying the tools of magic, neuroscientists can hope to learn how to design more robust experiments and to create more effective cognitive and visual illusions for exploring the neural bases of attention and awareness

Magicians use the general term �misdirection� to refer to the practice of diverting the spectator�s attention away from a secret action. In the lingo of magic, misdirection draws the audience�s attention toward the �effect� and away from the �method,� the secret behind the effect. Borrowing some terms from
cognitive psychology, we have classified misdirection as �overt� and �covert.� The misdirection is overt if the magician redirects the spectator�s gaze away from the method�perhaps simply by asking the audience to look at a particular object.

QUOTE

Tricking the Eye or Tricking the Brain?

Magicians consider the covert form of misdirection more elegant than the overt form. But neuroscientists want to know what kinds of neural and brain mechanisms enable a trick to work. If the artistry of magic is to be adapted by neuroscience, neuroscientists must understand what kinds of cognitive processes that artistry is tapping into.
Perhaps the first study to correlate the perception of magic with a physiological measurement was published in 2005 by psychologists Gustav Kuhn of Durham University in England and Benjamin W. Tatler of the University of Dundee in Scotland. The two investigators measured the eye movements of observers
while Kuhn, who is also a magician, made a cigarette �disappear� by dropping it below a table. One of their goals was to determine whether observers missed the trick because they were not looking in the right place at the right time or because they did not attend to it, no matter which direction they were
looking. The results were clear: it made no difference where they were looking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAnKvo-fPs0

Here are a couple more tricks from this guy Derren Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIIz2FAgwcw

This one, just for the look on the face of the guy he played a trick on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyHH3C3Gds

Any more "tricks" based on distraction would be welcome guys.

stevendabudgie

Posted: May 11 2012, 07:45 AM

Curious Citizen

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Joined: 2-November 10

I've found an interesting excerpt from a book in German on the hypnotherapeutic technique of confusion. The following is from Paul Watzlawick's "Change" and sums up a story from Milton Erickson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_H._Erickson

I have tried to retranslate the excerpt from German to English but there may still be some flaws as I am not a professional translator:

QUOTE

It was a windy day... a man stormed around the corner of a building and bumped heftily into me. I just stood there fighting against the wind. Before he coud regain his composure i looked inconveniently at my watch as if he had asked me what time it was:"Itś exactly ten past 2pm" although it was 4 pm. Than i moved on. When I was half a block away I turned around. He was still looking after me undoubtedly confused and disconcerted by my remark.

Watzlawick explains:

QUOTE

This is how Erickson described the incident prompting him to develope an unusual hypnotic guide later known as "confusion technique". What had happened?
When two men bump together the common consequence would be both apologizing. Dr. Ericksonś reaction completely redefined the context in a sudden and unexpected way as if his reaction had been the societally proper one after the other had asked for the time. This also is disconcerting as the information was obviously not correct and in contradiction to his polite and acommodating behavior.
The result was confusion, and there was no more information setting the puzzle pieces into a comprehensible reference frame. Erickson emphasizes the need to dissolve irritation and to find a new reference frame makes the person willing to cling to next best concrete information he gets. The confusion setting stage for reframing becomes an important step towards triggering change in order to "show the fly the way out of the bottle".
[B][/B]

Winkhorst

Posted: Jun 13 2012, 06:07 PM

Concerned Citizen

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Joined: 23-March 10

QUOTE (onesliceshort @ Jun 14 2010, 06:38 PM)

"What detractors called a "magic trick" was actually a branch of neuroscientific research. . . "

I'm not sure why you have a problem with the term "magic trick." Whatever the psychological explanation for acceptance of the Pentagon deception, the techniques used were those of classical prestidigitation. What the perpetrators did in essence was to create an illusion, the kind of illusion created by a stage magician, which normally fools the vast majority of his audience. Furthermore, no one would suggest that audiences are hypnotized in any clinical sense. In that case, it would not be necessary to fool the eyes of the observers. It would only be necessary to tell them what they were seeing. If, for example, a hypnotized subject were told that a table was a hippopotamus--to use an example from Charles Fort--it would not be necesary to give that table a big nose or a tail or to otherwise make it look like an African mammal.

stevendabudgie

Posted: Jul 4 2012, 10:21 AM

Curious Citizen

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Joined: 2-November 10

QUOTE

Fake video evidence can change people�s perceptions of what they have seen

Washington, Sep 15 (ANI): False video evidence can dramatically change people�s perceptions of events, and even convince them of testifying as an eyewitness to an event that never happened, according to researchers at the University of Warwick.

Associate Professor Dr. Kimberley Wade, from the Department of Psychology, led an experiment to see whether exposure to fabricated footage of an event could induce individuals to accuse another person of doing something they never did.

The researchers found that almost 50 percent of people, who were shown fake footage of an event they witnessed first hand, were ready to believe the video version rather than what they actually saw.

The team filmed 60 subjects as they took part in a computerised gambling task.

The subjects were unknowingly seated next to a member of the research team as they both separately answered a series of multiple-choice general knowledge questions.

One third of the subjects were told that the person sat next to them was suspected of cheating.

Another third were told the person had been caught on camera cheating, and the remaining group were actually shown the fake video footage.

Later, all subjects were asked to sign a statement only if they had seen the cheating take place.

Nearly 40 percent of the participants who had seen the doctored video complied.

Another 10 percent of the group signed when asked a second time by the researchers.

Only 10 percent of those who were told the incident had been caught on film but were not shown the video agreed to sign, and about 5 percent of the control group who were just told about the cheating signed the statement.

�Over the previous decade we have seen rapid advances in digital-manipulation technology. As a result, almost anyone can create convincing, yet fake, images or video footage. Our research shows that if fake footage is extremely compelling, it can induce people to testify about something they never witnessed,� said Wade.

The study has been published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. (ANI)

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health..._100247691.html

stevendabudgie

Posted: Jul 4 2012, 10:25 AM

Curious Citizen

Group: Member
Posts: 23
Member No.: 1,192
Joined: 2-November 10

QUOTE

Memory conformity: can eyewitnesses influence each other's memories for an event?
Fiona Gabbert*, Amina Memon, Kevin AllanArticle first published online: 17 APR 2003

Abstract
The current study investigated memory conformity effects between individuals who witness and then discuss a criminal event, employing a novel procedure whereby each member of a dyad watches a different video of the same event. Each video contained unique items that were thus seen only by one witness. Dyads in one condition were encouraged to discuss the event before each witness (individually) performed a recall test, while in a control condition dyads were not allowed to discuss the event prior to recall. A significant proportion (71%) of witnesses who had discussed the event went on to mistakenly recall items acquired during the discussion. There were no age-related differences in susceptibility to these memory conformity effects in younger (18�30 years) as compared to older (60�80 years) participants. Possible social and cognitive mechanisms underlying the distortions of memory due to conformity are discussed. Copyright � 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...ial+maintenance

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