By Cate Montana
The most controversial subject brought up in What the BLEEP Do We Know!? was not the concept of sub-quantum information as the substrate of all life (Planck Scale); nor was it the idea that quantum physics may have as much to say about God as religion. Nope. As per audience response, it’s the ships - those bloomin’ invisible ships on the horizon that only the shaman could see.
In researching What the BLEEP!?, Candace Pert and other scientists related the same story about the pre-Columbus era Caribbean tribe who perceived a disturbance on the ocean’s horizon but could not see the clipper ships anchored offshore as an example of how incredibly selective and narrow human perception can be. As disturbing as the thought is, recent studies in cognitive psychology reveal several fascinating aspects to human perception that give the shaman and the invisible ships validation. Inattentional blindness is the most pertinent.
Inattentional blindness is the inability to perceive aspects in a visual scene if they are not being deliberately attended to. In other words, if you’re not looking for it, you don’t see it. A mundane example is you decide your next car is going to be a blue Prius, or a red Mustang, and you’re torn with indecision between the two. All of a sudden as you drive around, blue Priuses and red Mustangs are everywhere. Where did they all come from? The answer is, they were always around, it’s just that now your attention has turned to them, poof, you see them.
In her work with the Achuar tribes in the Amazon, anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Marilyn Schlitz talks about her own experiences with inattentional blindness. On a field trip, she was in a group being lead through the jungle by a native guide. At one point the guide became very excited and kept pointing upwards at the forest canopy.
“Everybody was like, ‘Well, that’s not a big deal. We’re in a rain forest and there are lots of trees. Why is he getting so excited?’” says Schlitz. “But in fact, what he was seeing was a group of howler monkeys up in the treetops, which, to him symbolized food. To us, who were enculturated in the North - we hadn’t been trained to perceive them. Food, for us, is the grocery store. Next > 1 2 3
