[RC] Thought For The Week: Perception

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

This meme I came up with has been bouncing around my head over the  
last week:

     Perception = Sensation + Anticipation

It has manifest in several contexts:

1.  The impetus was a Caltech classmate talking about how the brain  
processes information -- sensory input feeds forward into the higher- 
level abstractions, which feed back into the low-level processing  
units to shape what is actually perceived.  We literally cannot see  
certain things "as they are" because of the way our brains works.

"Connections from one zone to another are reciprocal and allow higher  
synaptic levels to exert a feedback (top-down) influence upon earlier  
levels of processing"
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/121/6/1013
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/ 
9-35Spring-2004/CourseHome/

2.  I just ran across  a brilliant -- and shockingly moralistic! --  
book about Marketing as authentic storytelling (I might say myth- 
making), with the improbably title "All Marketers are Liars" (and  
yes, he's lying in the title :-).

"Seth is not a marketer. He is much more than that. I would say that  
he is a philosopher of marketing"
http://www.businesspundit.com/archives/002057.html
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/04/15/all_marketers_are_liars.html
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000905.shtml
http://www.allmarketersareliars.com/

3.  I'm working on some new initiatives at work around XML standards.  
Some friends are working on some very simple technology that has the  
potentially to revolutionize the way people use web pages, and the  
biggest challenge is not technical, or even political: it is simply  
community expectations.

[warning: very geeky content]
http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/06/what-are-microformats/
http://www.tantek.com/presentations/2004etech/ 
realworldsemanticspres.html


I think this also gets back to Billy's meme about how to create  
political change: it requires changing *both* anticipation and  
sensation -- not just what they see, but what they expect to see.   
That in turn requires both personal relationships and political  
leverage (e.g., power).

-- Ernie P.