Ever misplace your keys and have difficulty finding them, only to realize you passed over their location several times without seeing them? And yet, all along, you knew what the keys looked like as if to answer the question George asks Jerry in one of the Seinfeld episodes:
“What do they look like?”
“They look like keys, George, exactly like keys.”
You had the keys in mind as you looked, and eventually you saw them. As the joke runs, they were in the last place you looked.
In the Brain
No neuroscientist here, but I can hazard a guess on how we see things we formerly passed over. First, we look for lost objects with their image in mind. Second, we have cooperating neurons that can be attentive to a purpose. Third, our sophisticated visual centers enable us, even with our eyes’ blind spots, to sort through complex visual fields to recognize and categorize. It is this third property of the brain that enabled a Secret Service agent to spot a gun muzzle among the branches and leaves on the golf course, motivating him to shoot at and thwart the attempt of the would-be assassin aiming to kill Donald Trump.
But imagine the complexity of that process in the agent’s brain. Yes, he was looking for anything suspicious, but a gun barrel sticking out of thick vegetation? That’s a difficult task when we consider that “anything suspicious” could be a bomb, a drone, an axe, or a pearl-handled 45. Even if the agent had been predisposed to recognizing a gun barrel, he might have overlooked it among unfamiliar, even chaotic leaves and branches. If you can pass over familiar places where you placed your keys, then his spotting the barrel was quite a remarkable accomplishment. Imagine how much information the brain had to process in looking over that complex scene. Now consider how much your own brain processes as you drive down a pedestrian-lined street. Do you recognize those attempting to cross, a child running aimlessly, or an object, even a small potentially tire-damaging piece of metal?
Top Down or Bottom Up?
In a study titled “The Neural Dynamics of Attentional Selection in Natural Scenes” found in the Journal of Neuroscience,* co authors Kaiser, Oosterhof, and Peelen discovered “evidence for an early attentional biasing mechanism that facilitates the rapid detection of objects in cluttered scenes.” In short, the agent knew of potential threats, had seen them before, and was primed to spot any one of a number of objects in a cluttered scene.
It seems amazing, then, that the agents failed to act before the would be assassin shot at Trump during the Butler gathering. Attendees were shouting, “He has a gun,” and one officer even confronted the shooter before withdrawing. And here’s the difference between the two assassination attempts: It’s not the brain; it’s the mind.
Mind over Brain
The Secret Service usually surveys an area where a President or former President might appear. That surveying entails planning, and the planning in turn depends on reason. It isn’t the back of the brain’s visual center; it’s the frontal cortex that sets the plan for protection in any complex scene, from bushes to buildings.
It was the mind that failed during the first assassination attempt while luck prevailed for Trump but not for the victim Corey Comperatore. And that difference between mind and brain is the difference between responding to stimuli in a predisposed set of neurons and an ability to anticipate based on experience and knowledge. All the elements were supposedly in place during the Butler shooting: Police and secret Service. But those minds made faulty decisions, negating the ability of all those predisposed neurons to recognize, categorize, and react.
*https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/41/10522
“What do they look like?”
“They look like keys, George, exactly like keys.”
You had the keys in mind as you looked, and eventually you saw them. As the joke runs, they were in the last place you looked.
In the Brain
No neuroscientist here, but I can hazard a guess on how we see things we formerly passed over. First, we look for lost objects with their image in mind. Second, we have cooperating neurons that can be attentive to a purpose. Third, our sophisticated visual centers enable us, even with our eyes’ blind spots, to sort through complex visual fields to recognize and categorize. It is this third property of the brain that enabled a Secret Service agent to spot a gun muzzle among the branches and leaves on the golf course, motivating him to shoot at and thwart the attempt of the would-be assassin aiming to kill Donald Trump.
But imagine the complexity of that process in the agent’s brain. Yes, he was looking for anything suspicious, but a gun barrel sticking out of thick vegetation? That’s a difficult task when we consider that “anything suspicious” could be a bomb, a drone, an axe, or a pearl-handled 45. Even if the agent had been predisposed to recognizing a gun barrel, he might have overlooked it among unfamiliar, even chaotic leaves and branches. If you can pass over familiar places where you placed your keys, then his spotting the barrel was quite a remarkable accomplishment. Imagine how much information the brain had to process in looking over that complex scene. Now consider how much your own brain processes as you drive down a pedestrian-lined street. Do you recognize those attempting to cross, a child running aimlessly, or an object, even a small potentially tire-damaging piece of metal?
Top Down or Bottom Up?
In a study titled “The Neural Dynamics of Attentional Selection in Natural Scenes” found in the Journal of Neuroscience,* co authors Kaiser, Oosterhof, and Peelen discovered “evidence for an early attentional biasing mechanism that facilitates the rapid detection of objects in cluttered scenes.” In short, the agent knew of potential threats, had seen them before, and was primed to spot any one of a number of objects in a cluttered scene.
It seems amazing, then, that the agents failed to act before the would be assassin shot at Trump during the Butler gathering. Attendees were shouting, “He has a gun,” and one officer even confronted the shooter before withdrawing. And here’s the difference between the two assassination attempts: It’s not the brain; it’s the mind.
Mind over Brain
The Secret Service usually surveys an area where a President or former President might appear. That surveying entails planning, and the planning in turn depends on reason. It isn’t the back of the brain’s visual center; it’s the frontal cortex that sets the plan for protection in any complex scene, from bushes to buildings.
It was the mind that failed during the first assassination attempt while luck prevailed for Trump but not for the victim Corey Comperatore. And that difference between mind and brain is the difference between responding to stimuli in a predisposed set of neurons and an ability to anticipate based on experience and knowledge. All the elements were supposedly in place during the Butler shooting: Police and secret Service. But those minds made faulty decisions, negating the ability of all those predisposed neurons to recognize, categorize, and react.
*https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/41/10522
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