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Human perception is notoriously inaccurate. Eye-witness accounts, for example, are more about the witness than they are about the eye!

Experiments

In 1998, Arien Mack of the New School for Social Research and Irvin Rock of the University of California, introduced the term "Inattentional Blindness" in their book with the same name. In it, they reported on research that showed how poor humans are at seeing objects in their visual field, when their attention is not focused on those objects. One of the most hilarious experiments in this field (in my opinion), has to be the one called "Gorilla's in our midst" by Daniel Simons and his team of the Visual Cognition Lab of the University of Illinois. In this experiment, subjects were asked to watch a video of two teams tossing a basketball around and count the number of passes by members of a certain team (black or white). Around halfway through the video, a black gorilla would enter the scenes, walk to center stage (while the basketball passing would continue), thump his chest, and walk off. Reportedly, about 50% of the 10,000 subjects studied did NOT mention the gorilla when asked afterwards if they had seen anything out of the ordinary. Here's the video itself.

Parents and their children

Amazingly (or should that be: naturally), even parents' memories of their own children are extremely inaccurate. People come and see your newborn and exclaim "she's soo small", having got a baby themselves just months ago. You ask parents when their kids started doing particular things (like "looking around corners") and they usually can't remember. They remember the Big Milestones (first word, first step etc) but usually don have a clue about the so-called minor ones.

Li and I realized the same is happening to us. Suddenly we notice that Min Yi can do something, but we have no clue when it started. And often, something doesn't just start one day, but evolves gradually over the course of days or weeks. So here, for the good cause of remembering the small things, is a list of some of those Minor Milestones:

  • A while ago (see, I can't remember exactly when) I was in a store queueing to pay, and I suddenly noticed Min Yi stretching to look around me at the next person in line! Wow, she was actually trying to look around an object (dad in this case) to see another object behind it!
  • Min Yi goes through another phase of looking at her hands intensely. She's done that months ago, and the (supposed) thought-process behind it was something like "I see this weird shape and it moves, and it seems I can sort of control it". Now, she does it again, but while she looks she will do something like make a fist, stretch her fingers or make a circle with her thumb and index finger.
  • Min Yi likes to sit and at her grandparents' place her pillow it softer than at home, which makes her rock back and forth a bit. She's now figured out how to do this herself and it is probably her favorite pass-time! She can entertain herself for quite a while just by rocking back and forth and will makes herself (and us) laugh.
  • We've seen the first evidence of "I want" (versus "I need"): suddenly, one day, Min Yi cried like it was the end of the world when she had to let go of a toy. So great, she now knows how to use crying not only to signal that she's hungry, tired or otherwise not comfortable, but also that she strongly disagrees with what her parents do.
  • She can imitate us more accurately now, and especially with small things. We will, for example, rub our fingers on a piece of Velcro very slowly, in front of her. When we stop, she will try this herself.

Of course, someone, at some point, will come along and ask "so when was the first time that your child moved her right foot to the rhythm of music then realizing that she was out a beat, and cried because of it?". Gosh, we don't know.

Music on the go?

Then, as I was about to post this, my eye caught a story about mp3 breast implants. This made me think of my heel. Could I ask for the same thing in my heel? Would it be useful to have a bluetooth-enalbed Calcaneus? Of course, the geek in me screamed "YES!". But I think I won't do it. It's just too much hassle, and another device to protect. I mean, what about firewalls and stuff? No... no iPoot for me.