Video Interview with Genius Cartoonist Steve Willis

Perception is 90% Memory?

This excerpt from a recent article in the New Yorker is quite interesting. I wonder if it's true. I'm not as impressed as I used to be when someone quotes a scientific study to bolster his argument. I've worked in advertising long enough to know how easy it is to play with phrases like "scientists have found...".

Still, it feels to me like there is something worth considering in the claims made below. Certainly, most (perhaps all) stage magic depends on this "filling in" phenomenon. (Darius once remarked to me that he was getting tired of magic tricks because they all seemed to depend on just one thing: "hiding something.") I realized he was absolutely correct. Every great magic trick depends on the viewer automatically (and unconsciously) "filling in" for something that isn't there. Propaganda, marketing, advertising, public relations, philosophy, art, fiction, animation ... all work on the same principle. It's what happens when I look at the cracks in the floor or the bark on a tree and instantly see a cartoon face (or even an exquisitely drawn picture). In his book "Influence", Robert Cialdini calls this the "Click, Whir" effect.

Here's the excerpt:

...Or consider what neuroscientists call “the binding problem.” Tracking a dog as it runs behind a picket fence, all that your eyes receive is separated vertical images of the dog, with large slices missing. Yet somehow you perceive the mutt to be whole, an intact entity travelling through space. Put two dogs together behind the fence and you don’t think they’ve morphed into one. Your mind now configures the slices as two independent creatures.

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

(End of excerpt)

It also occurs to me that this may be one reason why my life feels like it's passing by more quickly as I get older. With each new experience, I'm actually processing less and less new information. In other words, the larger my frame of reference, the more likely I am to depend on past experience to process what's happening right in front of me. The genuinely "new" sensory experiences I had in an hour of "kid time" are progressively crowded aside to share room with my past sensory experiences during an hour of "adult time".

What do you think?

The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches

The Man Who Made Cartoons Swing

It says here that Raymond Scott never actually composed music for cartoons. "In 1943 ... Scott sold his music publishing to Warner Bros. Carl Stalling, music director for Warner's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, was allowed to adapt anything in the Warner music catalog, and immediately began peppering his scores with Scott quotes."

According to his wife, Scott didn't even watch cartoons.

Philip Jose Farmer Reminisces on his Interview with Tarzan

Garfield Minus Garfield

To quote my friend Frank:
"Just when I'd lost faith in the human race, along came this website. This is sheer, blinding brilliance... enjoy a religious experience!"

How to Make a Screen Print

How to make a papier-mache pig

Gourmet Paper Mache Pig

Surveillance Pizza Order

Here's a must see flash movie on the ACLU website. Thanks Timothy.

The Evolution of Urinating Calvin

Last week I saw this on the rear window of a car. God help us.

Here are some more musings on this "weird form of modern folk art."

Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

A likeness of Calvin appears on a set of decals with an arrow to signify urination. These are bootlegged images that became widely popular, and are disliked by many fans of Calvin and Hobbes because the images are contrary to the actual themes and atmosphere of the comic.

The original image shows Calvin filling a water balloon, not urinating.

The image of Calvin is here used in reference to his mischievousness. This constitutes one of the many copyright violations the strip has generated.

Another set of bootlegged decals show an image of Calvin genuflecting before (usually) an image of the Christian Crucifix. Ironically, this particular image of Calvin is taken from a strip wherein Calvin is offering a bowl of tapioca pudding to his television set.

Donald Westlake Science Fiction

Here is a collection of Science Fiction short stories by Donald Westlake. He explains that "there aren't enough of the stories to fill out a book, and I won't be doing any more, so this is where they'll be spending their afterlife."

Famous First Lines, Real and Imagined

Here are some interesting facts about a very interesting man. Fredric Brown often worked out the plots to his novels while taking long, solitary bus trips to nowhere and back. He is one of the three dedicatees in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (the other two are Philip Jose Farmer and Robert Cornog). Philip K. Dick was undoubtedly influenced by Brown. Ayn Rand praised him as "one of today's romanticists". Donald Westlake is also among his admirers.

He was also one of those authors who wrote wonderful opening lines. His novel Knock Three-One-Two begins with this: "He had a name, but it doesn't matter; call him the psycho."

Speaking of which, here is a rather tiresome list of Best First Lines chosen by the editors of American Book Review. I won't deny that some of these are really good, but many of them seem to have been chosen simply because they are the first lines of, ahem, IMPORTANT NOVELS. I also wonder how many of these would seem impressive if we didn't already know the story that was to follow. Is the first line of Catch 22 really all that great? It's the second line of that novel that seals the deal after all: "The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. " And, as usual, the Toni Morrison quote is just silly.

Here's another collection. I think I prefer many of these.

The Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose University sponsors the Bulwer Lytton contest for the best first line of an imaginary bad novel. There's a kind of snootiness about that contest that annoys me, however. Why settle for condescending imaginary first lines when you can read these from Harry Stephen Keeler?

Here's something cool: a collection of first lines from NanoWrimo novels .

And here's a mind bending collection that makes no claims about the merit of the line itself.

I can find no online collections of great novel dedications. I'll bet there are some gems out there.

Here's my favorite first line from a non-fiction book. Dariel Fitzkee's Showmanship for Magicians begins this way: "The fact that I feel there to be a definite need for this book is evidenced by my having written it."