Plain Sight Blindness
Sometimes, I have odd visual impairments. One of these is what I call plain sight blindness.
Plain sight blindness is an event of an individual not seeing an object that is present and most observers would consider the object as being in plain view.
I have seen events that on the face appear to be this issue. An example is when several of my family were looking at a grave marker for my father. No one saw that the name James was spelled Jame. Except me.
That, however, is a case of adding information that no doubt occurs in interpreting a familiar sight. Here was the addition of the missing ‘s’ that we all knew was the spelling of the name. This is also demonstrated with short readings where readers will not recognize missing articles. The text is seen as intact.
A recent incident of plain sight blindness involved a box containing a tube for my bicycle.
With my normal behavior, I set the box by my coffee pot in my kitchen. The box, about 2 in. by 2.5 in. by 5 in., was mostly black. There were large white texts at various places and some illustrations that included areas of yellow and red. It wasn’t the kind of coloration that can blend into a dark surface like the counter.
When I went to get the box, it wasn’t there. I looked behind the pot, on the other side of the pot, and the where it should be side of the coffee pot. No box. I specifically remembered placing it there. I double checked, and still no box.
I left to remove the tire and leaky tube. After I returned to the coffee pot, there it was! The box was clearly in plain sight. Some call this the “who put that there when I wasn’t looking” experience.
This is not the first time this has happened to me nor will it be the last. I know that others have the same experiences.
One of my daughters told me that she has this. Sometimes others will touch the blindness object and she still can’t see it.
After I mentioned blindness to a friend, she admitted to similar experiences. Once she telephoned her husband because she thought he took a cordless handset with him. The handset normally stayed in their living room. He answered it was probably on the coffee table. The handset suddenly appeared.
I’m not sure what mechanism involved. I have considered that there is a kind of interference pattern between the visual impression of the object and the memory of the object that cancels the visual input. Or, some might argue that some of us slip momentarily into another universe where the object truly does not exist.
I suspect that this is more of a memory problem.
The experience does not produce any anomalies. There were no holes or fuzzy spots where the box was. It simply did not appear. The area appeared just as if there were no box. The background was intact. If there were any kind of difference between the visually missing box and surroundings that would be a hint there was really something there.
So my hypothesis is that the vision of the object does not replace the buffer containing the memory of the area without the object. The buffer is possibly preloaded with familiar information so things like Jame pick up the missing ‘s’ from the preload.
I’m not sure how to test or investigate the phenomenon. With me, I don’t think it is common, at least I’m unaware of many episodes. Others may have a more frequent experience. The trigger is not predicable for most sufferers.
A question to be addressed is how much familiarity is needed before this vision anomaly can occur?
One thing that prevents more research is the denial that is a core to us humans. Too often, medical doctors will deny a patients reporting if the information does not fall within the doctor’s internal knowledge base. And then, if we are aware that such a vision/memory event is abnormal, we may deny it because we don’t want to consider that we are broken and face the derision from those who consider themselves as the standard of normal.
But, it is much better to accept that things like plain sight blindness occur and only then can we learn to recognize it when it occurs and possibly develop mechanisms to help.
So rather than tearing my house apart looking for this box that was missing only in my memory buffer, I took a short break and left the room. Simply leaving and then returning works occasionally. Engaging in a different activity seems to work better for me.
It is important to know that this is a real experience. I found the events unpleasant because I knew the missing objects had to be present. However, the way information gets into memory and interpreted is also real. That is the stuff that directs our behavior. It was not possible for me so see that box although I knew it was there. There were no visual clues to make it be there. And that is the reality of the plain sight blindness.
by Brian McCorkle
in category East Green Random Notes
