New thinking on Negative Hallucinations or what?/Why you miss finding your car keys when getting late for work

And all this time, I thought that not finding my car keys when they were right in front of me was a negative hallucination...

Perhaps it still is -- Whatcha tink of this news item?

Why you miss finding your car keys when getting late for work

London, Jan 31 (ANI): The brain system that is responsible for movement runs too fast for the visual system to keep pace, researchers have suggested.

This implies that when a person is hysterically looking around the whole house to find his keys, he might not be giving sufficient time to the system responsible for perception to actually decipher between each object.

It is this lack of coordination that makes a person miss the object even if he picks it up.

To probe deeper into how we search, Grayden Solman and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada developed a simple computer-based task that required participants to search through a pile of coloured shapes on a computer screen.

Volunteers were asked to locate a particular shape in a heap as fast as possible, while the computer monitored their actions.

“Between 10 and 20 per cent of the time, they would miss the object, even though they picked it up,” New Scientist quoted Solman as saying.

“We thought that was remarkably often.”

The team set up several other experiments as well to find out if volunteers were just forgetting their target.

They provided a list of items to a new group, which was to be memorised before the search task, and recalled afterwards.

The thought was to pile up each volunteer’s “memory load”, so that they could not hold any other information in their short-term memory.

Even though this was expected to have a negative impact on their performance at the search task, the extra load did not make any difference to the percentage of mistakes volunteers made.

To check whether the volunteers were adequately noticing the items they were moving, the researchers created one more task, which involved a stack of cards marked with shapes that only became visible while the card was being moved.

Solamn said that they were again surprised to observe the same level of error.ltimately, the team evaluated participants’ mouse movements as they were carrying out a similar search task. They found that participant’s movements were slower after they had moved and missed their target.

The slowing of mouse movements indicates that at some level the volunteers were aware that they had missed their target, a theory that is supported by other studies that show people have a tendency to slow down their actions after they have made a mistake, even if they do not consciously realise the error.

According to Solman, this reflects the brain’s “attempt to slow down the motor system”, to allow the visual system to catch up and conscious perception to occur.

What’s really interesting is the notion that the motor and perceptual system are decoupled. They’re both trying to help you find [your keys] but they’re not coordinating,” said Todd Horowitz, at Harvard University.

“There are implications for social search, such as a doctor looking through an X-ray or [security] looking through luggage,” Horowitz added.(ANI)

http://truthdive.com/2012/01/31/Why-you-miss-finding-your-car-keys-...

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Permalink Reply by Chris Dias on January 31, 2012 at 8:16pm

I've always wondered what it would look like if someone negatively hallucinated something & had no way of knowing what was behind it, sort of like with Zener Cards. How does the mind fill in the gap created by an entire blindfold?

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Permalink Reply by Richard Nongard - NLPBoard.com on January 31, 2012 at 9:18pm

Why tha hallucination occurs, does not mean a hallucination isn;t occuring. That is what the definition of a hallucination is. SO I say "Perhaps it still is"

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Permalink Reply by Richard A Luck on January 31, 2012 at 11:46pm

This is an interesting example of our own self-hypnosis. When looking for something because we are late, subconsciously, we tell ourselves "If I don't find my keys, I will be even later". This then, I think, blocks our conscious brain from seeing what is in front of us, because we are using our own hypnosis to fulfill our desires. Since we are focusing on the fact that we will be later, our brain sees that as a desire, and gives us exactly what it thinks we want.

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Permalink Reply by Barry Neale on February 1, 2012 at 4:11am

I am not sure that the notion that the part of the brain responsible for movement is faster than the visual system is anything new. If you have ever faced a professional tennis player or baseball pitcher then you will have experienced this phenomenon. A professional tennis player can serve a ball in excess of 140 miles an hour. I have stood there not moving as the ball whizzed passed me. I didn't see a thing and because I don't have the same skills as a professional tennis player I didn't move. However the professional reacts and returns the ball even though they don't "see" it.

The same is true with skilled magicians and sleight of hand. I have watched magicians disappear an object right in front of my eyes and yet I saw nothing. Then I watched the play back of the video at slow speed you can see the switch as plain as day.

So yes this is interesting but I don't think that the negative hallucinations created with hypnosis(or when you are trying to find your keys) are the same. To me this is more about beliefs and suggestion.

But hey, what do i know?

Barry

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Permalink Reply by Jesus Gonzalez on February 1, 2012 at 4:17am

This just happened to me.

I been searching all over the room almost going crazy, because I was completly sure that I had put my money on the table next to the bed before going to sleep

Then I renembered that phrase of calm down and "open your visual sense", then I noticed a bigger image of the whole house and like an "intuitive point" marked at the living room, so I moved there, and watched carefully around that area, and it was exactly where I looked at first.

The funny thing is that I was so sure that it was in the bedroom that now it's yet hard for me to believe that I found it in the living room :)

Jesus

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Permalink Reply by Lorrie Hale-Ozbey on February 1, 2012 at 8:22pm

I agree with the findings concerning looking for an object when rushed. But, what about when you don't feel stressed or rushed. Just the other day, and this makes me laugh still, while on the phone I realized I didn't have my phone and I casually went looking for my phone while I was talking on my phone. Or the time I walked into a local supplements store and stopped in my tracks...I couldn't recall why I had gone in there. Then, I burst into laughter as it struck me why I had gone in there. I had gone in for my memory supplements.

OK! So maybe I'm talking about memory issues. But, hey I did have 2 brain hemorrhages.

You know, something I've never seen discussed. Does the SC-mind have a sense of humor?