At The Same Time

The Human Eye is an incredible piece of technology, but the eye itself plays less part in your vision than you might think.  For one, most of what you see, including that which is right in front of you, is pieced together by your brain guessing what should be there, not by what you actually see.  Most people find this hard to believe when they first start learning about how the human eye works, but it is true, each eye has a blind spot which is almost straight in front of you.  What you see in that region of your vision is filled in by your brain.

More than this, it is surprising how little detail we actually see until we stop and make a conscious effort to observe as much as we can.  The concept of abstraction is one that is prevalent in the human mind - the idea that you do not need to know how everything works, you need only know how to use it - this concept is taken and extended and applied to almost everything we do.  To process everything we can sense at every moment would overload our brains in an instant, instead the brain creates layers and uses abstraction to hide away the intricacies of those below.  We are conscious of our breathing only when we focus on it, the same for the blinking of our eyes, these are functions that we don't notice in general, only when we stop and think about them.  Your vision doesn't go black every few seconds when you blink, instead you see a constant image, you only see darkness when you start to pay attention to your eyes blinking and you actually notice the moments when you can't see.  When you are ignorant of this mechanism, your brain shows you whatever it thinks you would see in that moment.

The remarkable thing about this whole process is that what we think and how we interpret the world, begins to shape how we literally see it.  This can become so extreme that we can miss things entirely for long and many a day before we actually take the effort to see it.  Like watching a movie when enough time has passed that we don't remember the detail, watching it again we often notice things we never noticed before.

One thing I like to do is multi-task, whenever I write I listen to ambient music, whenever I play games I listen to podcasts or music, I combine things that use different parts of my brain.  If I play a game that doesn't require much thinking then I listen to a podcast that involves a discussion.  If I want to play a game that requires concentration then I play music similar to that when I write.  Whilst combining these together I have noticed things that I never noticed before because I am being forced to process things in a different way.

I have two screens on my desk and I usually play games on the first, and have other applications on the second.  The game occupies my main focus and the second monitor occupies the periphery.  If I play a game that requires some focus, and play a video series on the second for background, I tend to notice things in the video in my periphery that I never noticed when I actually watch the video.  To give another example some games are repetitive and don't require much focus so sometimes I listen to audio books whilst I play, and often I end up taking in more of the story when listening with my subconscious whilst playing a game than I do when I just sit and listen to the audio book on its own.

This has got me wondering what other behaviours or tasks can be combined to create new experiences and how might that affect how I process them.

Music and writing are one of my favourite combinations, often I find inspiration in the music.  There are a few of my short stories that I wrote almost entirely by playing a single track on repeat whilst writing each - which incidentally has caused an association between the two to the point where those tracks and those stories instantly make me think of the other.