amsler@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM.UUCP (06/16/87)
Incidentally.... Re: Dr. Who's TARDIS. I've decided most of the discussions were wrong. Few people considered the function of the `relative dimensions stabilizer circuits' which are intended to compensate for dimensional anomalies. It would be QUITE possible to have the inside view of the TARDIS look either miniturized or like a small window into a larger room. One should recall that anomalies in the circuit can cause the TARDIS inhabitants to actually BE smaller when they emerge. Anyway... wrong discussion. `pop' Re: bionics. It has been my belief for some time that the mind operates using movie techniques when examining moving image memories. That is, we employ cuts, zooms, view angles, props, etc. in such memory recording and dreams. It would seem reasonable that we have borrowed this acceptable form of imaging and used it in films--why, for instance, should a cut between two views be acceptable cinamatography. Some cinematographic techniques violate our `dream' view methods. For instance, when one holds the camera at a bad angle the impact is typically to introduce the concept of the camera into the film, i.e. one way to show something is being seen through a camera lens in a film, is to have the camera do bad cinematographic techniques--ones which make the artificiality of the instrument apparent (another problem is whenever things get on the lens, such as rain or ocean spray or dust, etc.) Now, the speed to slow motion effect is interesting in that I don't believe it does have a natural human moving image memory counterpart. We never see things in slow motion ourselves, except as they have been slowed down by the use of film etc. That indeed explains to me why this is being discussed in AILIST. I.e. it is an artificial learned moving-image association. The interesting thing is that is SEEMS to be possible to introduce this into the visual recording system for memories in the brain without causing the ``Oh, this is being shot through a camera'' phenomena. I suspect what is happening is that this is analogous to the focusing of attention on the events which happened in a real moving image memory. That is, if one attempts to reconstruct an event that happened very quickly in real time after the fact, one will artificially create something like slow motion. ---- Note: I am NOT saying that we really have moving images in the brain. It is unclear we have images at ALL; however, the mapping between what we do have and what we accept in cinematographic portrayals is an interesting one.