By Eviatar Zerubavel
Many people have had the adventure of by surprise understanding that the keys or glasses which we've been trying to find in useless have been correct in entrance people the total time. searching for whatever doesn't make sure that you will see it, because the capability of our feel organs some distance exceeds our psychological features. even if we all know it or now not, we set up our belief systematically and that calls for focusing our realization: a few issues circulation to the foreground, different parts recede into the history. whereas neuroscience and psychology can let us know much approximately our cognitive undefined, the cognitive software program we use usually is going omitted.
In this ebook, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that we become aware of and forget about issues not only as humans, yet as social beings. What we attend and don't attend to is a functionality of the truth that we're attorneys instead of detectives, Koreans instead of americans, theologians instead of economists, vegans instead of omnivores. it really is the environment and our social lives that regularly ascertain how we really use our imaginative and prescient and listening to to entry the area.
Drawing on attention-grabbing examples from the paintings global, optical illusions, and all walks of existence, Zerubavel investigates how what we realize or forget about varies throughout cultures and all through background. A refined but robust exam of 1 of the primary positive factors of our awake lifestyles, this booklet bargains the way to take into consideration all that will another way stay hidden in undeniable sight.
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Extra info for Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance
Sample text
When smelling or tasting a curry, for instance, I can thus pick out the distinct figure-like odor41 or flavor of the cumin or garlic in it from its background-like olfactory or gustatory surroundings. ”42 Yet the applicability of the figure-and-ground model beyond the visual domain is most strikingly evident in our ability to differentiate auditory figures from the acoustic background in which they are perceptually embedded,43 as exemplified by the way we habitually parse continuous spoken input into distinct words.
For precisely the reason that it hinders our ability to spot things, however, their inconspicuousness also helps us when we try to hide them. Indeed, as a process ultimately antithetical to searching, hiding actually involves reversing the perceptual conditions necessary for a successful search. Given the fact that objects are more noticeable when they move against a fixed background, for example, one can easily understand why prey animals often “freeze” when trying to hide from a predator.
Often played in supermarkets, elevators, and public lavatories, “background music” is clearly not meant to actually attract anyone’s attention. ”61 As sometime film composer Aaron Copland glumly observed, it is “the most ungrateful kind of music for a composer to write. Since it’s music behind, or underneath, the word, the audience . . ”62 R E L E VA N C E A N D I R R E L E VA N C E Although originally conceptualized specifically within the context of sensory perception, the figure-and-ground model is nevertheless applicable to non-sensory modes of cognition as well.