Perception And Illusion

This is something I don't talk about too much and yet this is something I've always wanted to talk about -whew- Whatyoo smokin' over there Uncle George? Well, I've always wanted to express on this Weblog how the creative mind [my mind, especially] works. This may take a few hundred posts so please bare with me.

Let's start with this photo I found on an Ebay auction. These are the innards [okay, it's the inside of a bass cabinet] of a Fender speaker cabinet [that's what I said... Readers, take note: I'm a Gemini; I can have this conversation with myself in parentheses...]

When I first looked at the photo I couldn't see it for what it was. My eyes told me that the center cones were poking outwardly. Then I saw the bottom speaker. This started correcting my perception of what I thought I was seeing. It took me five minutes to see correct angles and when I did, the optical illusion was over. So, I tried to get it back to see the protruding center cones...I've lost it. I can't can't get the illusion back.

I've done the same thing when listening to music where I thought the top of the measure [or,1] was in an entirely different place. So, 1 becomes 2 [or 3 and a half] and I'm grooving to a different song altogether. And when I find '1' I'm amazed to hear a completely different song, sometimes shocked to think that one tick of the meter opens up something entirely different, sometimes disparaged to know that my perception is off...

...and sometimes the actual song sounds, often times, not as good as when I heard it with the displacement of '1'. Have you ever done that? Stay with me now...

...which leads me to life and one of the reasons why I haven't been writing often this past year. I was hearing the song wrong for so many years and one day I heard where '1' was supposed to be- where everyone else was hearing the '1'...and I was shocked. Life can be like that.

This Gendankenexperiment is brought to you by Ernst Mach...