First, the test, riffing off the mention lately of the number of different senses required to appreciate music:
[Spot the dogs <i>(Image: Gandee Vasan/Getty)</i>] For most people, just a swirl of black blotches on a white background, right? But what if I asked you to tell me about your dog Spot? Suddenly it's "See Spot run." Now think of all those "Jesus visions" found in pieces of toast and offered for sale on eBay. Or Maharishi declaring that the icicle forming on his balcony was a manifestation of Shiva. Almost certainly, to everyone who saw it before then, it was merely an icicle. But after he'd put a name to it, people went around claiming they'd witnessed a "miracle." Or think about those interminable boat rides, on which everyone was standing around shivering in the cold, waiting for something -- anything -- to happen. They're just staring out at a lake, bored shitless, and then Maharishi says something about the Vedas describing soma as having the quality of "the full moon on water," and suddenly everyone is oohing and aahing and the whole boatride becomes Soma Chanting Evening. :-) Just a reminder to folks to stop and consider whether you really see what you think you see, or whether you're just seeing what you were told to see... Words prompt us to notice what our subconscious sees It's a case of hear no object, see no object. Hearing the name of an object appears to influence whether or not we see it, suggesting that hearing and vision might be even more intertwined than previously thought. Studies of how the brain files away concepts <http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21728984.400-take-a-peek-inside-t\ he-brains-filing-cabinet.html> suggest that words and images are tightly coupled. What is not clear, says Gary Lupyan <http://sapir.psych.wisc.edu/> of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is whether language and vision work together to help you interpret what you're seeing, or whether words can actually change what you see. Lupyan and Emily Ward <http://www.yale.edu/perception/> of Yale University used a technique called continuous flash suppression (CFS) on 20 volunteers to test whether a spoken prompt could make them detect an image that they were not consciously aware they were seeing. CFS works by displaying different images to the right and left eyes: one eye might be shown a simple shape or an animal, for example, while the other is shown visual "noise" in the form of bright, randomly flickering shapes. The noise monopolises the brain, leaving so little processing power for the other image that the person does not consciously register it, making it effectively invisible. Wheels of perception In a series of CFS experiments, the researchers asked volunteers whether or not they could see a specific object, such as a dog. Sometimes it was displayed, sometimes not. When it was not displayed or when the image was of another animal such as a zebra or kangaroo, the volunteers typically reported seeing nothing. But when a dog was displayed and the question mentioned a dog, the volunteers were significantly more likely to become aware of it. "If you hear a word, that greases the wheels of perception," says Lupyan: the visual system becomes primed for anything to do with dogs. In a similar experiment, the team found that volunteers were more likely to detect specific shapes if asked about them. For example, asking "Do you see a square?" made it more likely than that they would see a hidden square but not a hidden circle. James McClelland <http://psych.stanford.edu/%7Ejlm/> of Stanford University in California, who was not involved in the work, thinks it is an important study. It suggests that sight and language are intertwined, he says. Lupyan now wants to study how the language we speak influences the ability of certain terms to help us spot images. For instance, breeds might be categorised differently in different languages and might not all become visible when volunteers hear their language's word for "dog". He also thinks textures or smells linked to an image might have a similar effect on whether we perceive it as words.
