VisionAndPsychosis.Net
©In Montgomery Alabama
A Demonstration You Can Do
Using this method you can verify your physiology includes
Subliminal Peripheral Vision
Copyright
2003
If you reached this page from a search engine and there is no menu
on the left margin use the URL at the bottom of the page to enter the site
Please read the Copyright page for generous permissions.
< ------- Menu
< ------ Cursor over for page
Home has the full list of site pages not in this menu.
If you are visiting from a school system browse the site for pages related to Internet addiction and video game play.
Simpler versions, the first section, of this demonstration are posted on children’s science pages and other Internet sites.
I wrote this demonstration to show subliminal sight and habituation in peripheral vision.
Introduction
The simple level of this text is intentional.
Even students in primary school can understand the demonstration.
You may find this experiment difficult. What you are attempting to do is evaluate a non-experience.
This is the the fading to extinction of the urge to look at movement. That is a reflex.
In normal day to day stream of consciousness this effect would not be noticed. At the point the urge fades to extinction, it is lost to consciousness.
No attention is given in those cases so that there is no temporary memory created. Memory will be created as you attempt this experiment.
This is because you are focusing attention as the urge to look fades.
Lighting is important
Humans see by reflected light. Light for this demonstration must be adequate and
generally from the front directed toward you. If the light is behind you, your
hand and finger will cast a shadow into your conscious sight. If the light is
too far to your side your hand will come between your eye and the light. Either
of these incorrect positions for lighting will interfere with the
demonstration. Adjust the lighting before you begin. Your raised hand is the object to
be illuminated.
Potential Problems
Your subliminal peripheral field of view is very narrow near your eye, part of your fist may protrude into conscious sight.
You know when you move the finger.
You can feel the finger move.
Miss-positioning will allow the moving finger to enter your conscious sight.
If all else fails have someone supply the movement for you with a simple object or tool.
Looking at a target, book, at arm’s length will cause your eye to accommodate widening the subliminal peripheral field of view. This might help.
Begin
Look at a point several feet away and maintain this eye position during the
experiment. Raise your hand with the index finger extended pointing at the
ceiling until it is beside your eye and about six inches away. Move the raised
finger slowly back until it is no longer visible. Your palm should be parallel
with your head.
Now, bend the raised finger quickly ninety degrees. You should have seen a flash
of movement while the finger moved but you should not see the stationary finger.
Adjust the position of your hand until this is accomplished. That will define
your Subliminal Peripheral Vision Field of View.
Reflexes
When you drew your hand back you should have experienced an urge to turn your
eyes to look at the moving hand. That is the reflex to look at movement in your
Peripheral Field of View. It is the first psychological event to note. As
you attempt the experiment several times in succession that urge will diminish.
That is called habituation and is a second psychological event involved with this phenomenon.
When you have successfully completed this first part of the demonstration the result, is evidence
you havehabituated the reflex to look at a moving object in Peripheral Vision.
This does
not occur subliminally since the movement starts in conscious sight.
In this part of the demonstration all the movement begins in Subliminal Peripheral Vision.
At this point you have successfully positioned your finger in your Subliminal Peripheral Vision. You can see it if it moves but can't see the finger when it is stationary. If you moved the hand and finger go back and reposition it then proceed to the next part of the trial.
Start wiggling the finger up and down so that there is regular
movement. You should see the movement and feel the urge to turn your eyes or
head to look.
As you continue, in less than thirty seconds, you will no longer feel the urge
to look. In fact you will no longer be aware the movement is there.
You will have successfully habituated notice of movement begun entirely in
Subliminal Peripheral Vision.
Your brain is still seeing the movement subliminally.
It therefore follows that ,
your conscious mind is unaware the movement is still there.
The part of you brain which evaluates movement in Subliminal Peripheral Vision is still seeing the movement. Evaluation is automatic and instantaneous when detection occurs. If the outcome of that automatic evaluation is that the movement meets the criterion for threat movement, a reflex will happen. There is no thought process involved. Reflexes cannot be controlled. That’s what makes them reflexes. The only part of the reflex you have control of is the act of turning your head and looking.
.
Summary
Sight is not sensory adaptable. It is not possible to stop seeing movement in subliminal peripheral vision as long as your eyes are open but you can attach selective notice to objects in your vision field. This decrement of attention can happen without your knowledge or it can happen as part of your normal stream of consciousness.
The normal operation of your physiology leading to a peripheral vision reflex is subliminal. This system operates separate from consciousness. Once your conscious mind loses notice of movement the connection to consciousness is gone.
‘Habituation to extinction’ makes the victim believe he has successfully ignored annoying threat movement. The remaining parts of the reflex all continue to happen. They will continue to happen as long as the position of the victim and the position of the movement remain constant.
An internal conflict in the victim's mind arises as the subliminal co-generated emotional content of the reflex continues.
The victim is unaware any thing is happening and does not know to move or escape. The victim begins to experience vague symptoms, which increase until a psychotic episode occurs. Each person's experience will be different. In the page, "A Letter to Sony," the coincidence of the co-generated emotional content being similar to the ambiance of the game, caused the players to experience the subliminal effect as part of game play. Those players were unaware their experience with the game was different from other players. The Everquest Connection assumes you have no previous exposure to basic psychology.
A classical explanation of habituation
Readers who have taken basic psychology will remember that
habituation is usually explained with the illustration of a sleeping puppy. If
you clap your hands near a sleeping puppy it will jump up and look around trying
to find the source of the noise and disturbance. Wait until it resumes its nap
and clap again. The puppy will jump up again and look around. If you repeat this
at intervals the reaction of the puppy will diminish until it will no longer
even look up when you clap. That is habituation to extinction.
In the Penguin book Dictionary of Psychology under Attention Reflex the entry cites Piltz’s reflex as, "a change in pupil size when attention is fixed on something." It does not state how the pupil changes. If the accommodation of the eye changing the shape of the lens and the change in pupil size work together it would have the effect of increasing the size of your subliminal peripheral field of view, widening it. This would have made early hunter gathers more sensitive to movement behind them. If the pupil dilated the increase in ambient light would make the rods less sensitive so that only larger movement would cause the reflex.
The effect of that combination would be that while the field of view would increase the sensitivity to movement would decrease. This would raise the threshold of delectability for small moving objects. In part this explains why this injury is so rare. Only large movement or point sources of light would qualify as meeting the criterion for detection and evaluation as threat movement. Without the completed definition of Piltz’s reflex this evaluation cannot be completed.
If you have friends or family who use computers in unprotected workspace in homes, dorm rooms, student apartments or small business offices email them the URL of this site and have them read this section on Prevention.
Prevention: This section is
now repeated at the bottom of every page.
The
rare occurrence of the injury establishes that is difficult to create enough
exposure to cause an injury. But when it does happen the consequences are
serious, possibly fatal.
Our
personal experience was intermittent human traffic during eight-hour workdays
for thirty calendar days.
If
you have a tower CPU mount it under your desk. That's the way they position it
in a cubicle. The hard drive busy light is about the height of your low
peripheral vision if you put the tower on the desk. Desktop reading of text or
writing notes beside the keyboard on the side of the monitor away from the tower
makes the blinking hard drive busy light appear to approach from behind when you
turn to view the screen again.
If
you have a computer work station/desk in which you turn ninety degrees to write
or do other non computer work, turn off the monitor when you turn aside. Remove
screen savers in this instance. The movement, animation for example, in your
screensaver, two-dimensional movement, might well be detected by your peripheral
vision at close range. Alternately cover the monitor screen.
All
home, apartment, or dorm computer workstations are in unprotected workspace.
To change that put the computer in a quiet room with no possible movement. If
that is not possible in a dorm or apartment position the computer so that your
peripheral vision can see only stationary walls as you use the computer in a
busy room. In Cubicles and 'Systems Furniture' these protective features are
achieved with peripheral vision blocking panels and corner seating positions. It
is called 'Cubicle Level Protection.'
If
you use computer or CD-ROM games for many hours day after day, the game playing
position should follow the same rules as the computer workstation. Battery
operated games will not run long enough on a single rechargeable battery to
cause a risk for SPVP.
Although
a laptop does not have a visible blinking light in peripheral vision the same
rules apply to your work position. There
should not be human traffic moving to you from behind. There should be nothing
behind you, which could enter your subliminal peripheral vision field as you
turn your head while working at the laptop and be mistaken for threat movement.
Only
movement coming from behind you into your Subliminal Peripheral Vision can cause
a peripheral vision reflex. If the movement source approaches you from ahead
then enters your Subliminal Peripheral Vision from conscious sight there can be
no peripheral vision reflex.
Repeated
for Emphasis:
A
single session or rare sessions will not cause this problem.
It
is the same day after day long hours of play or computer use with detectable
movement in ‘Subliminal Peripheral Vision,’ which would form the basis of a
risk for SPVP injury.
The brain’s detection system only evaluates movement. There is little recognition of the nature of the object in peripheral vision. If you have several hours exposure from human traffic at the library, while reading at an open table or seated in a reading room chair, followed by long hours watching TV with a critically misplaced ceiling fan sweeping detectable shadows around the room, the combination of those two behaviors might cause the problem. The suggestion is that either activity alone would not consume enough exposure time even if the critical movement is present.
Copyright 2003
This URL home page is http://www.visionandpsychosis.net Please include it if you print out portions of text or the whole page for off line reading. Please read the copyright page on this site. Do not duplicate the one copy allowed each reader. We want everyone, even non-computer users, to have the information but do not want old versions of revised material in circulation.
Tell everyone you
know and send them to the site.
##########