Interesting Links for 21-07-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Lord of the Rings, but with the characters dressed as other roles their actors have played

(tags:lotr funny )

2. Edinburgh pink door woman finally wins paint colour approval

(tags:Edinburgh colour housing Scotland )

3. NYPD Body Cam Data Shows the Scale of Violence Against Protesters

(tags:police cameras transparentsociety violence )

4. Did you know that the discovery that mental imagery varies dramatically from person to person occurred in 1880?

(tags:psychology history )

5. Apple says it would remove iMessage and FaceTime in the UK rather than break end-to-end encryption

(tags:apple encryption surveillance uk )

Comments

[bearshorty]

I have aphantasia, where I don't see anything if my eyes are closed, just black. I know things but can't see them if I'm not actually looking at them, can't hear unless it is actually playing, can't taste unless there is food in my mouth. I didn't realize that other people were different than that until I read Oliver Sacks' "The Mind's Eye" in my 30s and it blew my mind. Turns out that my husband can see movies in his head and I never realized that wasn't figurative. So it was very neat to read your link from the 1880 study. It is really fascinating just how differently people perceive the world and live in the world.

[channelpenguin]

I didn't realise that people actually "saw" things until maybe 10 years ago. I can "mentally" hear (especially this, play albums in my head) /feel/smell/taste ... but not see. Though oddly, I can match colours very accurately from memory e.g. is this thing in the shop the same shade of blue as this thing I have back home?

"Here then are two rather notable results: the one is the proved facility of obtaining statistical insight into the processes of other [p. 304] persons' minds; and the other is that scientific men as a class have feeble powers of visual representation. There is no doubt whatever on the latter point, however it may be accounted for. My own conclusion is, that an over-readiness to perceive clear mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highly generalised and abstract thought, and that if the faculty of producing them was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt to be lost by disuse."

Yes, I AM good at abstract thought, and am a software analyst and developer by trade, so 30+ years of "disuse" so to say!