week 13, Memory and magic

The article on memory reinforces to me the need for many colors of pens and highlighters in school. Like the infant interested in the blue square for a while and then the red square, I am more interested in my notes if they are in pretty colors. And varying between index cards and charts to get the information to look different while I study it! Whatever it takes to get that extra brain loop in the hippocampus! As for magic, or illusion, I think politicians must be taking lessons from illusionists these days, they sure know how to get people not noticing things. It reminds me of this one part of the film "What the @#*!! do we know?" -- they say that we get something like 10 million bits of information per second but we can only be conscious of about 2000. So there is just TONS of stuff going on that we don't notice. And the biggest factor in which things we notice is familiarity. So we keep creating our world in the image of how it's been. But if we can gradually shift which things we are perceiving, then our world changes. So, the blog assignment says "how might you view things differently now?" Well, if I go to an illusionist's show, I'm just going to let them misdirect my attention because I think it's fun to play along and be amazed, but other than that I'd like to be seeing through the illusion, or at least expecting what I'd prefer to see.