From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Tue Sep 30 1997 - 12:07:50 MDT
Hal Finney wrote:
>
> Derek Strong writes:
> > The key difference lies not in the richness of the pictures, nor in the
> > fact that they are moving. What is different is the rapidity with which a
> > vast number of different *scenes* can be (and regularly are) thrown at the
> > brain. Humans are used to, say, watching the high speed chase of a lion
> > running down a wildebeest. Fine. But TV lets you watch, say, a sprinting
> > lion, then a sprinting wildebeest, then the legs of each, then a passing
> > car, then an airplane, then a flock of birds, then the narrowing iris of a
> > human eye, then an explosion, then a view of the earth from space, then a
> > shot of a human sitting on a couch looking at all of this, all in a
> > timeframe that is *amazingly* short (on the order of a couple of seconds).
>
> This is true, but of course television has only been available since the
> 1950s, while the Flynn effect goes back at least a decade and probably
> several decades before that.
>
Can you say movies?
Movies were very big in the decade before TV, and they also expose
the brain to many quickly changing scenes.
--
The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
-William Gibson
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