Seeing what we expect to see.  Our brain always see what is there but we often register it as we expect it to be. I have a question for you. If I write long sentence will you read it as it is or as you expect it to be?

Did you notice that I left the “a” out prior to the word “long” in the previous sentence? Or, did you notice that I wrote “see” instead of “sees” in the sentence prior to that. If you said yes to either of those, you saw what what you expected.

Here is a classic image:

Do you see two faces or do you also see the vase (or goblet)  between the faces? It is human to miss the vase.

We humans often see what we expect to see and and ignore the total set of input to our brains. Professionals have studied this human characteristic. For example, a group of radiologists were ask to examine a series of chest x-rays. They placed a image of a gorilla in one x-ray.  How many of the radiologists spotted the gorilla?  Very few. Some 83 percent of the radiologists missed the gorilla. The radiologists were focused on their image of a cancer cell.  Focused expectations are like that.

Did you notice the image of the bird in the left part of the picture or did you only notice the larger shadow of the bird?

Did you notice the cloud face in the upper left?

What do you see here. This photo is directly from my camera.

Did reading left to right help? That is the only change I made to the iPhone photo.

I isolated it with PhotoShop, the changed the background clouds, and added wind. Now look at the photo above. 

Did the trumpet pointing to the “deer” change your focus – make it easier or harder to see the deer?

Thanks for bearing with me – I enjoy playing around with PhotoShop – creating photographic focus tricks for my eyes and brain.

Oh – By the way, you may want to see what is going on at the TGO Photo Club web site

As you can see, I am never sure what I see vs what my brain expects to see.