Some of you may be interested in the following:
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">“In a Psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Brunner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts…
“Even on the shortest exposure many subjects identified most of the cards…For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal…With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of the anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: ‘That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it—the black has a red border.’ Finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment to their categories…One of them exclaimed: ‘I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!’…We shall occasionally see scientists behaving this way too.
“Still other experiments demonstrate that the perceived size, color, and so on, of experimentally displayed objects also varies with the subjects previous training and experience. This makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is requisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual conceptual experience has taught him. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, 'a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’” (Thomas Kuhn, <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>)
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Those who are wondering what the significance of these experiments is relative to what we have been doing in our research on faces and other artifacts on Mars; my guess is that if some of these objects were found on earth (at least some of the best of them) there would be no question but that we were looking at objects of art or designed construction or manufacture. But when found where they are not “supposed to be,” they fall outside the accepted paradigm, and therefore by definition, they “can’t be” what they seem to be. As I related once before, a science PhD and local professor present at a talk I gave on the subject once admitted to me that even if she saw an obvious sculpture of George Washington in one of the verified, NASA images, she wouldn’t believe it. Perhaps she would say: “I’m not even sure what a face looks like anymore. My God!”
Neil DeRosa
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