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Even explicitly knowing I was looking at signs telling me to "relax and enjoy myself," I found myself interpreting the sign as the warning/restriction counterpa
by Sambdala 13y ago
Even explicitly knowing I was looking at signs telling me to "relax and enjoy myself," I found myself interpreting the sign as the warning/restriction counterpart message until my second or third (even more careful) reading.
It's a lot like the phenomenon where if you include and and twice in a row, you'll likely not realize the typo.
- lutze 13y agoThis is remarkable, I initially thought you'd typo'd your typo and had to do a double take to spot it. Isn't the brain a wonderful and scary thing.
- simba-hiiipower 13y agothat first one took me the longest.. i kept reading it as 'keep off the grass'. really confused me as to why that was there among all the other more pleasant signs..? it was only after going through all the others that i got it. seems my brain is conditioned that in the presence of 'keep' and 'grass' i should remain off.
- easytiger 13y agoi thought it was more of an issue issue when you put them on line breaks.
- klibertp 13y ago"I found myself interpreting the sign as the warning/restriction counterpart message" Couldn't you just read the whole sign properly on the first try? Why did you glance over the rest of it? I think that's your fault - and our society these days - and not the fault of the signs, which were cute and funny.
- darkchasma 13y agoYou think the problem with society is our pattern recognition, and exclusion behaviour? A result of being inundated with perpetual signage which is irrelevant, or inane? Since this is a result of society, why are you getting all blamey?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Sambdala 13y ago"Yeah, that conditioning is probable. And scary. Just think how many more signs/words/images/emotions are hardwired in your brain. Scary."
- klibertp 13y agoI'm sorry, I didn't want to sound that negatively (as other comments on this level indicate I did). The thing is that I understand why someone would glance over something twice before reading it at last. And I'm not going to shoot people who do this. But I still don't think that's a good thing to do, a good behavioral pattern. In this example, seriously, why didn't you read the sign on the first try? Probably because, as you quoted, you were expecting the sign to be boring shit, not worth reading. But hey, you were told that it is not shit beforehand! So, to have trouble with reading it, you must have: a) not believed that the signs are legitimate content; or b) struggled and failed against your reflexive rejection of the signs as garbage. The latter option is more probable, I think. You tried to overcome your conditioning and pattern-matching defaults, and finally you succeeded. But you could succeed earlier, had you exercised! You could try to play with optical illusions or do puzzles, or something like this. And after a while you would have no problem at all with recognising the signs in this article. What I wanted to say in my previous posts is that this lack of ability to ignore reflexes, see and (sometimes try to) understand is a very good thing to develop for yourself, and that unfortunately people are less and less aware that this is the case (scary!), because what they come in contact with is constantly getting larger, cruder and more obvious.