Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain by Tom Stafford, Matt Webb

readings and then interpolate the answers
     than it is to spend a long time processing a single scene. Equally important, if you know
     what you want to do, maybe you don’t need to completely interpret a scene; you may need to
     process it just enough to let you decide what to do next and in acting give yourself a
     different set of sensations that make the scene more obvious.
    This school of thought is an “ecological” approach to perception and is associated with
     the psychologist J. J. Gibson. 1 He emphasized that perception is a cognitive process and, like other
     cognitive processes, depends on interacting with the world. The situations used by vision
     scientists in which people look at things without moving or reaching out to touch them are
     extremely unnatural, as large as the difference between a movie at the theater directed by
     someone else and the freewill experience of regular real life.
    If you want people to see something clearly, give them the chance to move it
     around and see how it interacts with other objects. Don’t be fooled into thinking that
     perception is passive.
    In Action
    One example of active vision that always happens, but that we don’t normally notice,
     is moving our eyes. We don’t normally notice our blind spots [ Map Your Blind Spot ] or our poor peripheral vision [ See the Limits of Your Vision ] ,
     because our gaze constantly flits from place to place. We sample constantly from the
     visual world using the high-resolution center of the eye — the fovea — and our brain constructs a constant, continuous, consistent,
     high-resolution illusion for us.
    Constant sampling means constant eye movement: automatic, rapid shifts of gaze called saccades . We saccade up to five times a second, usually without
     noticing, even though each saccade creates a momentary gap in the flow of visual
     information into our brains [ Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision ] . Although the target
     destination of a saccade can be chosen consciously, the movement of the eyes isn’t itself
     consciously controlled. A saccade can also be triggered by an event we’re not even
     consciously aware of — at least not until we shift our gaze, placing it at the center of our
     attention. In this case, our attention’s been captured involuntarily, and we had no choice
     but to saccade to that point [ Grab Attention ] .
    Each pause in the chain of saccades is called a fixation .
     Fixations happen so quickly and so automatically that it’s hard to believe that we don’t
     actually hold our gaze on anything. Instead, we look at small parts of a scene for just
     fractions of a second and use the samples to construct an image.
    Using eye tracking devices, it is possible to construct images of where people fixate
     when looking at different kinds of objects — a news web site, for instance. The Poynter
     Institute’s Eyetrack III project ( http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/ ) investigates how Internet news readers go about perusing news online ( Figure 2-3 ) and shows the results of their
     study as a pattern of where eye gaze lingers while looking over a news web site.
    Part of developing speed-reading skills is learning to make fewer fixations on each
     line of text and take in more words at each fixation. If you’re good — and the lines are
     short enough — you can get to the point of one fixation per line, scanning the page from top
     to bottom rather than side to side. Figure 2-4 shows typical fixation patterns
     while reading.
    Figure 2-3. The pattern of eye fixations looking over a news web site; the brighter patches
     show where eyes tend to fixate 2
    Figure 2-4. A typical pattern of eye fixations when reading 3
    Figure 2-5 shows a typical
     pattern of what happens when you look at a face. You fixate enough to get a good idea of
     the shape of the whole face with your peripheral vision, fixating most on those details
     that carry the most information: the eyes.
    Figure 2-5. A