dence . We tend to overlook or discount information that is unexpected or inconsistent
with our beliefs. Anomaly, once recognized, can transform our perspectives fundamentally, but not without an emotional toll: “My God!” was the subject’s response,
when the stakes were only recognition of a playing card!
“Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages.”
[Wallace Stevens, 1931]
The scientific challenge is to use admittedly subjective means, coupled with imperfect assumptions, yet achieve an ‘objective’ recognition of patterns and principles. To do so, we must understand the limitations of our methods. We must understand how the perception process and memory
affect our observations, in order to recognize our own biases.
Perception, Memory, and Schemata
Perception and memory are not merely biased; even today, they are only partially understood. In
the mid-17th century René Descartes took the eye of an ox, scraped its back to make it transparent,
and looked through it. The world was inverted. This observation confirmed Johannes Kepler’s
speculation that the eye resembles a camera, focusing an image on its back surface with a lens
[Neisser, 1968]. Of course, ‘camera’ had a different meaning in the 17th century than it does today;
it was a black box with a pinhole aperture, and it used neither lens nor film. Nevertheless, the analogy between camera and eye was born, and it persists today.
If the eye is like a camera, then is memory like a photograph? Unfortunately it is not; the mistaken analogy between memory and photographs has delayed our understanding of memory. The
eye does not stand still to ‘expose’ an image; it jumps several times per second, jerkily focusing on
different regions. The fovea, the portion of eye’s inner surface capable of the highest resolution,
