Day 197: 7/16/13- Finish Inside of a Dog
New Thing- Finish Inside of a Dog
Inspiration: Dogs
Time: A few weeks (I had to put it down while I was writing)
Bottom Line: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
-Groucho Marx
Reflection: I finally finished reading a really interesting book by Alexandra Horowitz called "Inside of a Dog." Here is the description: "The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a
cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each
other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the
reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draws a
picture of what it might be like to be a dog." I really learned alot about man's best friend and I want to share my favorite excerpt:
“Dogs make up for their dearth of cones [that let eyes see
color] with a battery of rods, the other kind of photoreceptor in the retina.
Rods fires mot in low-light situations and at changes in light densities, which
is seen as motion. In the human
eye, rods cluster at the periphery, helping us notice something moving out of
the corner of our vision, or when cones slow their firing at dusk or night. The
density of rods in dogs’ eyes varies, but they have as much as three-times as
many rods as we do…
One could say that dogs see the world faster than we do, but
what they really do is just see a bit more
would in every second. We marvel at dog’s seemingly magical skill at catching a
Frisbee on the fly, or following a rapidly bouncing ball…dogs actually see the Frisbee’s,
or the ball’s, new location a fractions of a second before we do. Our eyes are
internally blinking in those milliseconds that a flung Frisbee is moving along
its course toward our heads.
Neurosciencetists have identified an unusual brain disorder in
some humans called “akinetopsia,” Theses akinetopsics have a kind of motion
blindness: They have difficulty integrating a sequence of images into the
normal perception of motion. A person with akinetopsia may begin pouring a cup
of tea and then not register a change until many images later, but which time
the cup is overflowing. As non-brain-damaged persons are to akinetopsic, dogs
are to us; they see the interstices between our moments. We must always see a
little slow. Our responses to the world are a split second behind the dogs." pg. 131-132
What intrigued me about this was the implications of another creature "seeing a bit more world in every second" then we do. How awesome is that?! If a dog sees time and the things that are moving through it in a different way, think about what that means for God?! I am not suggesting that God has something as simple as creture-like eyes, but it stands to reason that if a dog can see where a ball is going a fraction of a second before we can, what more can God see? I feel a sermon coming on!
