I suspect I have this wrong, but I think one of the postings suggested that
in our everyday activities we "perceptually crop" our sight -- that is, our
visual-perceiving faculty (where by 'visual perceiving' I mean solely the
recording-as-sense-data what is "coming through" our eyes) does not feed
through for
processing everything hitting the eyes at any given moment. I take it
"perceptual cropping" amounts to cropping our "field of vision". What's in
that
field, but outside the "frame" just doesn't "get through".
This seems comparable to "aural cropping" I'm familiar with -- the "blocking
out" of, say, inane babble at the next table in a restaurant: we "hear" it,
but we don't, let's say, "register" it in any detail in our consciousness. (I
skip here the question of whether or not the likes of a hypnotist could make us
retrieve the conversation from some memory level below consciousness.)
This aural cropping -- a bit like the difference between "hearing" and
"listening" -- is something I have experienced. But I have not experienced
visual
cropping in a similar sense of having some inner judging mechanism "frame" a
selected part of the total field of vision.
I certainly recognize the rigidity, the fixedness, of my focal point. But for
me this is not an adjustable frame. My "focal point" is, of course, not a
"point" -- it has some breadth. When I'm reading, I'm not limited to, say, one
letter or even one word at any instant. But it's not more than the three or
four words in the center of my field of vision at any instant. A phrase four
lines up and over to the left may be in my field of vision but I don't register
in useable detail.
How I "frame" things into attention visually is by moving my focal point. But
I cannot adjust the "dimensions" of that frame. Where I may be going wrong is
in failing to gasp that those who talk of perceptual cropping simply mean the
conscious, deliberate consideration of the field of vision, and how it COULD
be pre-cropped, like a photographer "framing" his shot.
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