This is an abbreviated version of a fascinating
Mind Hack post today.
"Once you have learnt something you see the world differently. Not only can you appreciate or do something that you couldn't appreciate or do before, but the way you saw the world before is now lost to you. This works for the small things as well as the big picture. If you learn the meaning of a new word, you won't be able to ignore it like you did previously. If you learn how to make a cup of out of clay you won't ever be able to see cups like you used to before.
We can see this in microcosm if we look at a small example of what is called one-shot perceptual learning. What do you think this picture is?
Now probably you don't know, but I would like you do savour the feeling of not knowing. Try and taste, like a rare wine, what the perceptual experience is like. You can see the parts of the picture, the blacks and the whites, various shapes, some connected to others and some isolated.
If you now look at this popup
here then you will have this taste washed out of your mind and irrevocably removed. It will be gone, and you will never be able to recover it. This is why I asked you to savour it. Now look at the original again. Notice how the parts are now joined in a whole. You just cannot see the splotches of black and white, the groups, the isolated parts, again."
Fascinating!
Read the full post:
Mind Hack...
Apparently George W Bush listed "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" as one of his ten favourite books of his childhood.
