Seeing What You Don't See

Seeing What You Don't See
Visual precuing, training the brain, and my 2 cents

In The Sniper Mind http://geni.us/SniperMind David Amerland takes a look at how snipers train to hide themselves by looking for ways to feed the brain of the observer the information it expects to see or disrupting the flow of information so the brain does not see what it should.

Visual precuing is training the brain to see by giving it an instance of a pattern that can then be recognized in a different situation.

The simple experiment is to stand on the ground and toss a penny over your shoulder. Then try to find the penny. Usually, the penny is difficult to spot and requires some searching.

To speed up the process, you can toss a second penny in front of you, notice it on the ground, and scan again for the penny tossed over your shoulder. Once you've seen the penny in front of you, the first tossed penny is easier to spot.

My results were a bit skewed. I tossed the penny over my shoulder. Because it was new it shone out from the rough ground. But then, continuing on with the experiment, I tossed the penny in front of me. It bounced and went... somewhere. I didn't see it.

I turned around looked at the first penny, got the image in my mind, turned again and immediately saw the second penny hidden in the leaves. The precuing worked. (Just not exactly as expected.)

First image - the over-the-shoulder penny.
Second image - the tossed-in-front penny.

Can you spot them?
#thesnipermind

The Sniper Mind p.46