MDDM23: The Brain's Anxiety

[Dave Monroe]

   "'An Hallucination,' Mason assures him, 'brought on
by the Snow, the vanishing of detail, the Brain's
Anxiety to fill the Vacuum at any Cost....'" (M&D, Ch.
36, p. 363)

Horror Vacui?  See, e.g. ...

http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/vuoto/eorror1.html

http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/vuoto/eorror2.html

http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/vuoto/eorror3.html

http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/vuoto/eorror4.html

Tabula rasa?  See, e.g. ...

http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/locke_understanding.html

Blank page, at any rate.  But cf. also The Pulfrich
Effect, a.k.a. The Pulfrich Illusion ...

http://dogfeathers.com/java/pulfrich.html

"Now that you have gone to the trouble of acquiring a
dark filter, try viewing 'television snow' with it.
Tune a TV set to an unused channel, or disconnect the
video input, so that the television screen shows a
constantly changing pattern of random dots ('snow').
When viewed with a dark filter over one eye, the snow
pattern will appear to break up into two sheets at
different depths, one sheet moving to the left and the
other moving to the right."

[...]

"The 'Pulfrich Effect' was first explained in 1922 by
the German physicist Carl Pulfrich (who could not see
it, due to blindness in one eye). I learned about it
from the 'Amateur Scientist' article by Jearl Walker
in the March 1978 issue of Scientific American
magazine (Walker01). The 'Television Snow' illusion
was discussed in a Scientific American article: 'The
Resources of Binocular Perception' [...]. Various
'Television Snow' Illusions were discussed by Jearl
Walker in the April and May 1980 'Amateur Scientist'
articles...."

http://dogfeathers.com/references.html

And see as well ...

http://www.siu.edu/pulfrich/

http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/faculty/montag/vandplite/pages/chap_13/ch13p2.html

"The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead
channel."  --William Gibson, Neuromancer ...


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