Dateline did a show on how the mind works last night. Did you see that?!

[NNN0LHI]

http://video.tvguide.com/Dateline+NBC/Did+You+See+That/5550791?autoplay=true

It was an amazing show. Not only do people tend to hear what they want to hear, they also see what their brain tells them to see. Even if its wrong.

After seeing that show you can begin to understand why "eyewitness" testimony is pretty much worthless. I bet we have a lot of innocent people who are in jail today due to eyewitness testimony, because this flaw is embedded in most peoples brains. Scary.

Don

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38154937/ns/dateline_nbc/

Did You See That?!

Can you really believe what you see? Dateline puts the human brain to the test

Part 1

It's an unsettling phenomenon, not seeing what should be obvious... It's in the news all the time.

A submarine commander looks through his periscope, thinks the coast is clear and orders the sub to surface – slamming into a fishing vessel directly above, killing nine people.

A crime victim points out her attacker in court with absolute certainty. He’s convicted and spends ten years in prison – until DNA evidence proves his innocence.

Airline pilots think they have an eye on the controls, yet they miss warning signals and fly more than an hour past their destination.

How does this happen? How do intelligent, conscientious people miss what's right in front of them? It has to do with how our brains process information. Tonight, we'll prove that you can't always believe what you see and what you hear, and you'll have a chance to put yourself to the test.

It all comes down to the fact that, at any given moment, our senses are bombarded with all kinds of sights, sounds, and smells – many happening at the same time – and it's impossible to consciously think about all of them at once. So, the brain is designed to filter out what it thinks is the unnecessary information for the task at hand, but sometimes there's an error in that filtering process. It happens to all of us at one time or another. Think it couldn't happen to you? Don't be so sure.

[teenagebambam]

1. I didn't watch the whole show

But I'll vouch for the results. I witnessed a bank robbery once and was asked to give a description of the suspect, which was very detailed, but ended up being not at all what he looked like or what he had been wearing

[aikoaiko]

2. It really is amazing how inaccurate memory and perception is.

Eyewitness testimony is not worthless, however, but it is much less reliable than most people think.

[qazplm]

4. it's about 50/50

which makes it fairly worthless unless you have multiple witnesses.

[aikoaiko]

5. Where did you come up with 50/50?

:shrug:


eta: Even 50% accuracy could be somewhat meaning if the base rate is 1/6 or 1/8 in a lineup where the expected level of accuracy of guessing is 17% to 13%.

[CrownPrinceBandar]

3. "Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them" - O.W. Kenobi

[localroger]

6. My wife experienced a demonstration of this

While she was in class in college one day two men burst in, had a brief altercation, then one chased the other out. The teacher asked the students to write down what they just saw; every single student wrote that a black man had chased a white man with a knife. With these results in hand the actors were invited to re-enact the scene in which the white man chased the black man with a banana.

[seabeyond]

7. son and i were talking the other day about motorcyclists and bicycles. how we literally overlook

them because our brains is saying pick up the cars and trucks... when we drive. they can be right in front of us, but we dont see them.

i understand the concept of this show. have seen many examples in life. it is interesting

[rucky]

8. It was on my TV, but I wasn't really paying attention. n/t

[lonestarnot]

9. Nothing is ever as it appears.

[patrice]

10. There's a great little demonstration in which you saturate certain visual processors with a

spinning, disc, with a black-and-white spiral drawn on it and then have your subjects look away to see a large part of the central portion of their visual field twist and warp itself for a few seconds (while certain neurons in their retinas return to normal parameters).

I used to do this in my psychology classes in order to give my students a sense that there is not a 1:1 ratio between the phenomenal world and their brains.