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[MrWiggles]

Its paradolia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Not a lot of study has been placed into the phenomena as of yet. A 2009 study, shows that face recognition is an early cognitive function, but it didnt go into possibly evolutionary path for it. Carl Sagan is of the similar thought to you, Sensei.

[Stove]

Pareidolia is one of my favourite things in the world.

I wonder what it says about my psychological state that I had so much difficulty spotting the "ghost" in the picture. Normally I experience pareidolia almost constantly when I look at anything with any degree of visual noise. Faces everywhere!

[Sensei]

What it means, Stove, is that you will never survive a ninja attack.

But more seriously, I'm also a fan of the theory that the more you want/expect something to be there, the more likely you are to see it- whether or not it's really there.

[Stove]

But I, myself, am the legendary Lobster Ninja!

And I'm also a pirate and a viking, both of which can easily defeat a ninja, no matter what anyone says!


Interestingly, the psychology of pattern perception/magical thinking gave me some pretty interesting ideas about how magic should work in Dwarf Fortress. I planned to write up a big long post in the Suggestion forum, and then I discovered in one of the podcasts that many of the ideas I came up with were things Toady had already planned.

[MrWiggles]

What it means, Stove, is that you will never survive a ninja attack.

But more seriously, I'm also a fan of the theory that the more you want/expect something to be there, the more likely you are to see it- whether or not it's really there.

Is that something like projected psychology?

[Neruz]

What it means, Stove, is that you will never survive a ninja attack.

But more seriously, I'm also a fan of the theory that the more you want/expect something to be there, the more likely you are to see it- whether or not it's really there.

Is that something like projected psychology?

It's related to the way the brain works; you need to remember that the amount of information coming in through your 5 senses is far too much for the brain to have any hope of processing all of it. So the brain cheats, it only actually processes the important bits, and then it actually makes up the rest. 99.9% of the time it gets it right, because the brain is really good at making stuff up, sometimes it gets it wrong, and that leads to things like seeing faces out of the corner of your eyes, or thinking you heard something.

Of course, when it all goes wrong, you have hallucinations.


The only real reproducable example of this is the blind spot, an area of your vision that the eye cannot actually see because the retina gets in the way, your brain is constantly making up the contents of the blind spot, and if you know where it is and how to use it, you can have great fun with it. I used to amuse myself in long classes by using it to erase my teacher's head, as the brain would look at the 'border' of the blind spot, determine that the border was mostly the white space of the whiteboard, and so fill the blind spot with white space, erasing the teacher's head.

[Nivim]

 How did you arrest your eye well enough to make that work? I can't seem to hold my blind spot still for longer than a second.

[PhilbertFlange]

How did you arrest your eye well enough to make that work? I can't seem to hold my blind spot still for longer than a second.

I started doing this again reading these forums. It's really easy to do it for you left eye. Just read the forums with only your left eye. As you read along, suddenly the poster's avatar will vanish, replaced by the grey background of the forum. I noticed Captain Mayday's "&" vanishing while reading Nist Akath last year and I can't stop myself from trying to make other avatarts vanish. 

[Lalandrathon]

What are the repeated symbol thingies that blend in with the branches in the haunted forest scene? Some sort of signature? I count 3 whole ones, 1 partial, and 1 thing that looks like a partial reflection. Two of them in essentially a vertical line just to left of center in the image.

[smjjames]

I think that is the same'ghost' that everybody else mentioned.

[TKTom]

With the youtube style red circle I have marked the ghost that I saw.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

if there is a different one, i cant find it.

 You know, I really like the way he seems to be taking one step towards the viewer. That's the way I like to see things that are sinister. Too often are things ruined by "scary music", jolting sounds or overblown physical cues.

 For instance:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the recently released version of Wolfman: there is a scene in which the main character is lying in bed ill and defenseless, he  repeatedly sees creatures coming to attack him. Noticably a "Wolfboy" and a full grown "Wolfman" (though that one flies at him from the left of screen in less of a vicious maul, more of a rugby tackle, I genuinely laughed) I thought at the time that this scene would have been far more scary if it had been played in silence (like the silence of night, not absolute silence) with a solid shot. Imagine seeing from the point of view at the pillows, looking down the bed, some creature sneaking in from the corner of the room to the end of the bed. Then it creeps up to the view, perhaps investigative or perhaps always with a hideous grimace on it's face.

[Huesoo]

Hey guys lets talk about DF related art!

[Hungry]

/gasp A radical, get him!

[Deon]

No. You should POST ART here, not talk. Silly ones...

[Fault]

Here's some headshots of characters done for a forum RP game I'm DM'ing.



They're pretty DF-related, seeing as all these races appear in Dwarf fortress.