Zen Moment | An Image Appeared In My Wall Today

Whenever the face of a deity manifests itself in the burnt pattern on some toast or a water stain on the side of a building, I am a bit of a skeptic. Anyone who has ever marveled at optical illusions is aware that our brain takes a lot of shortcuts and makes a lot of assumptions in order to supply us with the perception of sight.

There are also other brain processes that convert the borders, lines, and shapes we see into patterns and objects, and even more functions that connect these patterns and objects with meanings. In a nutshell, they help us quickly sort the patterns of light from the world we see, into perceptions of the familiar and unfamiliar, safe and unsafe, so we can make split second decisions that are more likely to enhance our survival chances or at least win that bid on eBay.

The concept of taking shortcuts when we convert patterns of light into the objects we perceive is easy to demonstrate and anyone can experience it by looking at various optical illusions. Thus it isn't as controversial and easily dismissed. There's more fuzziness when it comes to the next level, the brain processes that convert the visual stimuli into patterns and patterns into meanings. That is something with no easy equivalent to just looking at images. Our evidence and understanding for those processes come from the combination of neurological tests on lab animals, and humans who have suffered brain damage, from car accidents, strokes, tumors, etc. There are people who can make out shapes and name what they are, but not describe them. There are people who can recognize that a pattern is a face, but not associate that face with a specific person or name. There are people who completely ignore the left half of their body... putting on only one pant leg, one sleave, one sock, one shoe. Such observed behaviors lead researchers to conclude that if a person can do A but not B and C, or B but not A and C, etc, then each aspect must be part of a separate function.

Combine these well-founded concepts into an understanding of how we perceive the world, starting from the input of lights, darks, and colors into the retina of the eye, and through the brain processed by various, separate systems designed to recognize things and sort them into preconceived patterns and understandings, and it becomes much clearer why we can see animals form in the clouds and faces in the random patterns of wood grains. We see what we are pre-programmed to see.

But even so, when it happens to you, it's still pretty damn cool!

After our big tornado warnings of last night, I was rewarded today with more nasty thunderstorms while at work. A longstanding, pesky water leak on the wall next to my desk decided to manifest an icon in a stain:



I present to you, Geoffrey The Giraffe!
Somebody contact Toys R Us to get in here and get some pictures before Geoffrey fades into oblivion.