Jungle dweller sees brick wall ?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Dinosaur, Jan 22, 2009.

  1. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    My environment has almost always included brick walls.

    The perceptual images of brick walls constructed by my visual system seem to be incredibly detailed. I seem to be seeing each individual brick.

    When I am between buildings in my apartment complex, I can see three brick walls. If I turn around or run/walk, the perceptual images seem to be reconstructed almost immediately to reflect my change in point of view.

    There is no doubt that my visual system does not have the bandwidth and processing speed required to do the reconstructions in what appears to be real time. A large percentage of the visual image is constructed using memory of previously viewed brick walls and some very complex algorithms in my brain.

    If a jungle dweller were transported to my apartment complex, would he/she be able to do as well in perceiving brick walls? Might the jungle dweller require some time in my environment before being able to do as well as I do with perceiving bricks walls & reconstructing visual images in real time?

    Might an adult jungle dweller transported to my environment never be able to do as well as I in visualizing brick walls. Note that a very young child taken to a foreign country learns to speak the foreign language flawlessly. Very few adults who relocate are able to speak the new language without an accent.
     
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  3. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think so. :shrug:
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    * * * * NOTE FROM THE LINGUISTICS MODERATOR * * * *

    But there are other skills involved in learning a language, some cognitive and some physical. If you don't practice forming the phonemes of a second language when you're young--say thirteen at the oldest but one or two is far better--neither the speech center in your brain nor the musculature in your tongue nor the other components of your speech apparatus develop with the synapses and flexibility to form them. The same is true of the grammar, syntax, and sheer worldview that is to a greater or lesser extent unique to each language.

    People who grow up with a language in which tone expresses emotion, like the Indo-European tongues, have an almost insurmountable difficulty with Chinese, in which tone is phonemic and you have to learn to express your feelings much more precisely in words. Conversely, people who grow up with an astoundingly streamlined and modernized language like Chinese are bewildered by our Stone Age paradigms of singular and plural, masculine and feminine, present past and future, nominative and accusative, and all the other things we express clumsily with barely audible inflections. Or our ridiculously tiny set of prepositions and conjunctions that are expected to describe all possible relationships.

    It isn't just perception, although to a certain extent it is. (We don't hear the tones in Chinese very well and they don't hear our word endings very well.) It's the way we learn to think.

    Still, perception and cognition are interconnected. We see bricks because we know how walls are built. We even fool ourselves with simulated brick siding to make a house look more expensive, something that doesn't work in California because we have the cognitive superstratum of not wanting to be under a pile of bricks after an earthquake.

    I learned to play go 45 years ago and have taught the game to many people. Several perceptual changes must occur as your understanding of the game advances. First you have to see the board as an array of intersections rather than squares they happen to define. Then you have to see connections only in orthogonal directions, never diagonal. Finally you have to recognize common shapes that can easily be built upon what's already on the board--not the same as chess or checkers because you continually place new stones on the board rather than moving the ones that are already there.
     
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  7. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    While it's true that vision is a learned process, I don't think a jungle dweller would have any difficulty percieving a brick wall. He might not know what it is, but he would see it just fine.

    Vision is developed between the ages of birth and about 8 years old. If a child has some problem with one or both of his eyes and it is not corrected before age 8, he will never develop normal vision. The problem can be as simple as needing glasses. Suppose a child has no refractive error (no need for glasses) in one eye, but is extremely near-sighted (myopic) or far sighted (hyperopic) in the other. His parents will never realize he has a problem because he will function normally due to the one good eye. Then, when he finally comes in for an eye exam at age 16 after failing his vision screening to get his driver's licence, it will be too late and that eye will never see normally. On the other hand, if the child had come in at age 5 and simply gotten glasses, he'd have developed normal vision in both eyes. The same thing happens when one eye is turned out or in. The human brain hates double vision and will ignore the turned eye and, therefore, never learn how to use it.

    But, getting back to our savage, assuming he has no significant refractive error his visual system will have developed normally and he'll percieve the wall just fine, even if he's not sure what it is.
     
  8. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    43,184
    Sure. Perhaps even better than you can, assuming for a second that your surroundings actually have any effect on how well you can picture things in your head. Jungle scenery is a little bit more complex than brick walls.
    But I don't think there would be any difference.
     

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