Treadwell went on, she paced faster, occasionally flinging an arm toward the screen to illustrate her point. She was staring straight ahead at the display at the front of the lecture hall.
“Charlie!” An urgent voice whispered her name, inches from her ear. The next time you enter that same house, you’ll already know where you are.” It’s drawing a floor plan, creating a palette of colors, and saving an inventory of images to draw on later, so you don’t have to go through that exhausting intake every single time. “It’s why when you enter a house for the first time you experience a moment of dizziness. In order for you to function in the world, your mind fills in the spaces of that tree with its own leaves and branches.” A hundred pencils scribbled all at once, filling the lecture hall with a sound like scurrying mice. “If your mind didn’t do this, then simply walking outside and seeing a tree would consume all your mental energy, leaving no resources to do anything else. It fills in colors and trajectories based on what you’ve seen before, and calculates what you should be seeing now.” Another image flashed onto the overhead screen. “Your mind creates motion when there is none. The professor gave a hint of a smile and continued. The class tittered dutifully, then became quiet as the image of another multicolored design flashed onto the screen. You may be quite thankful for this phenomenon, depending on the habits of your roommate.” We see this most easily with olfactory fatigue: your nose ceases to perceive a smell when you’ve been around it for a while. The things we are familiar with are the things we can-for the most part-ignore. It does that based on your experiences, and your expectation of what is normal.
At every moment, your senses are receiving far more information than they can process all at once, and your mind is forced to choose which signals to pay attention to. “When I say ‘sensory overload’ I mean that quite literally. “Your eyes deceive you every day, filling in the blanks for you in a world of sensory overload.” An image of dizzying geometric detail lit up the canvas screen behind her. Her steps were slow and even, almost hypnotic. Treadwell walked back and forth across the platform at the front of the auditorium.
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