Subconscious

February 24th, 2006General0 comments

I noticed that when I approach an escalator that isn’t running (switched off for maintenance or whatever), for a split second I visually perceive it to be moving — like those spiral optical illusions.

Anyway, I have found that the escalator steps always appear to be moving towards me — i.e., I’m going the wrong way. I have to will my foot forward to get myself to step onto a perfectly still escalator.

I’ve been trying to figure out what this means. Does everyone have this sort of optical illusion, or is my subconscious just really negative? Am I afraid of escalators?

One thing that it makes me realize is that my mind perceives things in a hierarchical manner. When I look at a broken escalator, for a split second my mind still perceives movement only because my mind associates escalators with movement.

Stairs don’t move, and therefore I don’t get the optical illusion of stair steps moving against me when I look at them. That only happens with escalators.

Thus, my mind must already be subconsciously primed to know how an escalator works. It triggers that optical illusion based on the visual recognition of an escalator.

What would be interesting is to test this theory. What if I were to subtract the visual elements from an escalator? Would I still get that optical illusion?

Like, if I were to remove the black rubber handrails, would I still get the illusion? What if I replaced the metal steps with wood?

At what point in this deconstruction would my subconscious mind stop visually perceiving an escalator as an escalator?

Enough nerd speak! Let’s talk about videogames!

I currently have an Xbox 360, a PS2 and a PSP. March is set to be an awesome month for videogames, what with the new Tomb Raider and Ghost Recon coming out. Also Katamari is coming out on the PSP.

I love videogames. They let me turn off my brain and relieve my stressors.

Also, books, movies, and TV are like our shared cultural dreams. So are videogames. Except in an online videogame we’re sharing the same dream. And we can kill each other in a friendly manner.

Plus videogames tend to closely approximate my own sleeping dreams, where I’m usually jacking cars and punching blocks to make mushrooms appear.

Krazy Kat panel, 1937.

There’s an awesome exhibit going on at the UCLA Hammer Museum right now: Masters of American Comics.

We went to check this sucker out yesterday, and it was the best thing I’ve ever seen at the Hammer. They’ve collected original Popeyes, Dick Tracys, Krazy Kats, and Peanuts comics — many of them surreal, hilarious, and still very fresh.

What I learned was that the 1930s were dominated mostly by cartoon mice throwing bricks at the heads of cartoon cats.

You could spend hours looking through this exhibit and reading everything. It closes on March 12th, so you should hurry if you want to check it out. By the way, Thursdays are free!