Baby Cakes makes his motion picture debut in "Paw and Order"
What does a 19th-century zoetrope have in common with a 21st-century streaming video?
Like all motion-simulation devices, they depend on the fact that the human retina retains an image for about a tenth-of-a-second so that if a new image appears in that time, the sequence seems to be uninterrupted and continuous. They also depend on what is referred to as the Phi phenomenon, which observes that we try to make sense out of any sequence of impressions, continuously relating them to each other.
So explains Oliver Sacks in a New York Review of Books essay on western science's developing model of the nature of consciousness, from William James' dreams of the zoetrope as "a metaphor for the conscious brain" to recent neurobiological theories of the neural basis of consciousness.
. . . Instead of seeing the brain as rigid, fixed in mode, programmed like a computer, there is now a much more biological and powerful notion of "experiential selection," of experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain (within genetic, anatomical, and physiological limits, of course).
On June 15, 1878, Eadweard Muybridge photographed the first successful serial images of fast motion. Among his studies of animal locomotion was a running cat.
[via Arts & Letters Daily]
Baby Cakes is a major cutie. :)
Posted by: emmeke | January 15, 2004 at 06:23 PM
Like music. Record your favorite Chopin in two second snatches, mix 'em all up and replay at random. Whaddya got? Cacophany. So as the eye remembers does the ear.
Posted by: WILLIAM | January 16, 2004 at 06:57 PM