Drider_it

Ok your sitting in a living room.. tv is blaring, ceiling fan twirling, and a clock is going.. at some point.. you tune it all out except for one noise..

Are there actually sensory limits on the human brain?
And how do they work...

take for instance.. standing in a field. there is knee high grass growing for a rough squarage of 50 feet behind you is a road ahead is a semi-circle of trees. to your left is a stream. to your right is a run down old house. there are myraid bug sounds along with the usual birds chirping. Its autum.. the leaves are many bright colors.

Now you tell me.. why dosent your brain lock up? Can you imagine what would happen if you could tune it all in at once. I guess it comes down to Focus. In the field of your vision, smell and hearing, the human mind tends to tune out alot.. maybe up to around 95% of everything but what your "Focusing" on.

Take for instance a crowed room. 30ft x 40ft. People are carring on conversations.. you stop and about 10 feet away among all the other background noise you focus on a woman talking to her son. Now why could you do that.

my initial thought on this was when i was laying on the couch.. the tv did its.. "ive been on too long on a blue screen so im shutting off" I just layed there.. then i heard the clock tick.. and then i couldnt get the sound outta my head .. tick tick.. tick tick... until i turned the tv back on.

almost like lying in bed and hearing your pulse acutally course through/near your ear drums...

thoughts..?

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DokuPuffs

I suppose the brain has been trained to filter out unneeded sounds. It really is hard to just sit and try to concentrate on all the sounds...you end up moving from one to another then forgetting about the past ones. As you do it you hear more and more. So crazy!

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Drider_it

exactly.. now imagine ... could the human brain take in all that you can see and hear at once?
I mean just looking across the lawn.. you have each blade of grass, each detail on a leaf, each and every critter moving. Its acutally staggering when you think about it.

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It means only one thing, and everything: Cut. Once committed to fight, Cut. Everything else is secondary. Cut. That is your duty, your purpose, your hunger. There is no rule more important, no commitment that overrides that one. Cut. The lines are a portrayal of the dance. Cut from the void, not from bewilderment. Cut the enemy as quickly and directly as possible. Cut with certainty. Cut decisively, resoultely. Cut into his strength. Flow through the gaps in his guard. Cut him. Cut him down utterly. Don't allow him a breath. Crush him. Cut him without mercy to the depth of his spirit. It is the balance to life: death. It is the dance with death. It is the law a war wizard lives by, or he dies.

Eldaire

I'm pretty sure that's the objective of most eastern monks and stuff actually.

anti fishstick

yes mindful thinking. being aware of your surroundings. it's a beautiful thing.

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Halx

your brain filters out everything that isn't important
if you payed attention to everything at once, you'd be a mess.
You can PM me and I can give you the scientific text book explanation... but this is a very practical way for the brain to function

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Drider_it

Ive always noticed the fact that say when a person goes blind they use other senses to compensate for it. Sorry this all happend thursday on the job site.. I just stood up for amoment and got a little light headed and then everything hit me at once..

It was like i could take in everything... the old building there .. i could comprehend every crack in the old paint on it. the sounds.. even the sun seemed.. more alive.

heh wish i could have those moments more often in my life.

Just to be able to stand still and take it all in and actually understand it all.

__________________
It means only one thing, and everything: Cut. Once committed to fight, Cut. Everything else is secondary. Cut. That is your duty, your purpose, your hunger. There is no rule more important, no commitment that overrides that one. Cut. The lines are a portrayal of the dance. Cut from the void, not from bewilderment. Cut the enemy as quickly and directly as possible. Cut with certainty. Cut decisively, resoultely. Cut into his strength. Flow through the gaps in his guard. Cut him. Cut him down utterly. Don't allow him a breath. Crush him. Cut him without mercy to the depth of his spirit. It is the balance to life: death. It is the dance with death. It is the law a war wizard lives by, or he dies.

Johnny Rotten

The human ear has a set range of frequencies it can tune to, and the human eye only sees in the visible light spectrum, and you can't see very well in the dark. You can only hear and see so far away, and like you said, the brain can focus on the most important stuff.

Some people can't "cross-talk," where you have two conversations among four people where one of the paired communications is crossing your line of attention, so filtering differs from person to person.

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cartmen34

That's why I always sleep with white noise, aka, a fan. I can't fall asleep listening to myself breathe!

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Lunchbox7

Even though you conciously only take in a certain amount of perceptual stimuli (eg the person you are talking to in a crowded room) you do take in a hell of a lot more subconciously. If your at a party talking to someone and another person across the room says your name you whip your head around to look at them. This is called the 'cocktail effect'. You managed to pick out a single word out of an entire room of cross conversations. Amazing in my opinion.

Idiot savants have been shown to have problems with the filtering of information in their brain. If your not sure what an idiot savant is think of Dustin Hofman in 'Rainman'. The person his character is based off is a famous idiot savant. That is why they have trouble interacting socially with people but are really smart in a certain area. They see alot more but they get confused in their brain and thus have trouble interpreting everything.

Another interesting thing is that the human brain needs perceptual stimulaion. They have done experiments where they put people in sensory deprivation devices (cant see or hear). It didnt take long for them all to start having halucinations. The brain needs to have its perceptual abilities stimulated to survive so it self stimulates them in the absence of external perception

absence_of_color

Wow, this is so interesting, Im aroused!

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joesmith

the brain filters and creates a LOT - put someone in a dark room witha Very quiet noise... say a beeping- and then slowly turn the lights on as you fade the beeping out - they will SWEAR and really beleive that they still hear the beeping, even after you have secretly turned it off - the brain will compensate - thinking you can't sense the sound since the light is providing a flood of new visual stimulus-

i have no idea how much of our daily perfection is filtered out and replaced with a rough model of what we think we should be sensing.

hundred-peons

Yah I remember there was a professor who had his class count all the times a player passed the ball at a basketball game.

Halfway through the second quarter, he had a man in a bear suit run across the court flailling his arms.

All the people counting the passes had no recollection of what was obviously something to remember to everyone else watching the game.

Part of it is concentration, the other part is necessity. Interestingly a repeated noise can be ignored if their is a secondary stimuli. Yet if the same noise is the only stimuli, it can act as a form of torture. Think of japanese water torture, you're stuck in a room with no stimuli except dropping water. Or like the above poster mentioned a ticking clock alone in a dark room, will drive you crazy.

taliendo

I think maybe its something called selective perception.

The best analogy that I can think of is about shit. Ok, so having grown up in rural ohio I've had the pleasent experience of spending some time in cow barns and let me tell you when you first walk in, its not a bouquet of roses. After ten minutes you don't really notice it so much, and after a day of raking hay and cleaning stalls you won't notice the smell at all. However, if you stop for a moment and tell yourself, I'm in a cow barn and it should smell like shit, your brain will recognize the scent and bring it back as putrid as it was as the moment you walked in door.

Another example: My grandparents live with railroad tracks practically in their back yard. Growing up it was very hard to sleep through the night when we would go and visit because the train came through at 2am, 4am, and again at 6. They didn't notice it, because they had lived there for over two decades and eventually your brain decides that sleep is more important and doesn't alert itself when hearing the whistle blow during the middle of the night.

explanation: we are terrifically built machines that can do wonderous things.

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absence_of_color

Oh great!!
Lets make a perfect example of cow manure!
I knew that stuff had a purpose. Haha.

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