Jason Clark

On our day off, Bev and I sometimes go over to Borders in Kingston, grab a coffee, and I’ll get to scan several books and magazines. I love the selection of magazine and journals Borders carry. A few days ago, I read the latest issue of Scientific America Mind, which is devoted to the issues of Consciousness, and how we construct reality.

It was fascinating from a the point of view of the interface with theology and the questions about truth, and how we know something is real.

There was one article in a particular, ‘The Movie in Your Head :Is consciousness a seamless experience or a string of fleeting images, like frames of a movie? The emerging answer will determine whether the way we perceive the world is illusory’, by Christof Koch’.

In short it shows from current research how we construct the experience of reality from a series of images, like the way a movie works, that move fast enough to look seamless. But the number of images per second changes with experiences, i.e in a car crash and heightened moments our brains will produce more frames/images. We can’t perceive the change in rate of the images, so have the experience of time going slower instead. And when day dreaming, we make less images which means time goes faster.

Also big implications for those of us wanting to understand the nature of images and how and why they are so impacting for communication. Seems more and more research is showing that we made the mistake of thinking we could explain things with words more accurately, when images can convey far more accurate meaning, quickly.

We find that in using words to explain things simply we have ended up using more and more words to explain our words. We experience the world in metaphors, in images. (I have posted a few times from some of my research and reading on the use of metaphors in communication, and epistemology, here, here and here.

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