Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I’ve been slowly exposing Speedy and El Duderino to my rather eclectic taste in music (metered in at age appropriate levels, of course). I wanted to share and discuss one of those recent experiences.
“It’s stupid, contagious
To be broke and famous
Can someone please save us from punk rock 101
My Dickies your sweatbands
My spiked hair, your new vans
Let’s throw up our ‘organs’ for punk rock 101″
“Wait a minute, that’s not right. I’m pretty sure it’s “rock hands” dude. No, it’s organs. Buddy, throw up our organs doesn’t make any sense. These are rock hands, you throw them up at concerts or listening to music. I still think it’s organs.”
Above are the lyrics from Bowling For Soup’s song Punk Rock 101, followed by the exchange between El Duderino and I while singing it together in the car.
To be fair, I’m not sure I knew what rock hands were at age seven either. And, that is kinda the point. Our brains do an incredible job of filling in blanks where we have gaps.
The gaps can be visual, auditory, information, knowledge, anything. We crave a complete picture and understanding so much that we sometimes fill in those gaps unconsciously.
Such is our desire for completion, and our discomfort with incompletion, that we have evolved to make this process automatic.
El Duderino didn’t know the lyric, he had an incomplete set of information. He heard some sounds, and filled in a word he understood that matched what he heard, even if it didn’t make much sense. The brain drives us to make a complete unit rather than leave the lyric unsung.
This is not uncommon for any of us singing along in the car, (especially before the days of looking up lyrics on the internet). But, it is a much deeper phenomenon that is studied in psychology, neurology, and vision.
“Filling in” is the phenomenon where the empty space left by our physical blind spot appears to resemble the color, brightness, or texture of the surrounding area.
Each eye has a physical blind spot where the retina joins the optic nerve, and there are no photoreceptors. With both eyes open, each eye covers the other’s blind spot. But, even with one eye closed, the brain will automatically fill in the area based on what else it perceives.
Illusion A is a classic example. With both eyes open, you can see the black dot on the right. With one eye closed, as the black dot moves into your physical blind spot, your brain fills in the red and green stripes.
In this case the filling in is relatively harmless. El Duderino sings a funny lyric and we laugh about it.
I’m sure I’m still butchering lyrics to many of my 90s favorites and filling in what makes sense to my brain, regardless of what the artist intended.
A different kind of filling in can be a bit more problematic. Troxler’s fading is shown in the example below. Stare intently on the red dot and watch the colored ring fade away.
We haven’t quite pinned down the exact mechanism that causes the fading phenomenon. You can read more about it here. Basically, a lot of big words, and confusing neuro pathways to say we arent sure exactly when images get transfered at different levels to the brain, and what may disrupt those images in the transfer process.
Hearing El Duderino so clearly fall into the filling in phenomenon, I remembered learning about it in flight school.
Part of our training was on the physiology of the eyes and ears. How they work, and how they can sometimes play tricks on us.
I had never before heard of Troxler’s fading, though. It is impressive how fixating on such a small point can impact literally the entire surrounding.
Laser beam focus is super important. I wrote about that a few weeks ago. But so is being able to zoom out and see the surroundings.
How often do we let ourselves lose sight of the bigger picture, letting it slowly fade while we fixate on the minutiae?
How often are we not even conscious of where our focus is being directed? What is there, lurking out in the periphery that we are missing?
I love singing in the car with the boys. I love that it gets me out of my own head and into a shared space with them. I love it even more when it can open up new realizations and learning. So throw up your ‘organs’, and don’t let yourself fixate on the wrong thing. You might miss serenity hiding in the periphery.
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.
