Word: colorism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...child gets bored--or "habituated," as psychologists call the process--his attention level steadily drops. But it picks up a little whenever some novelty is introduced. The train might be green, or it might be blue. And sometimes an impossible thing happens--the train goes into the tunnel one color and comes out another...
...arousal or interest) show that impossible events involving familiar objects are no more interesting than possible events involving novel objects. In other words, when Daniel has seen the red train come out of the tunnel green a few times, he gets as bored as when it stays the same color. The mistake of previous research, says Sirois, has been to leap to the conclusion that infants can understand the concept of an impossibility from the mere fact that they are able to perceive some novelty in it. "The real explanation is boring," he says...
...anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony...
...APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data...
...seats we were facing.) Behind him, on 12 rows of bleachers than span the stage, a chorus of about 150 keened along. Once the plot kicks in, though, the music becomes westernized and, to these inexpert ears, neither daring in form nor instantly appealing in tune. The color scheme ?? rigid and vivid in Hero, wonderfully lurid in Golden Flower ? is not so much subtle here as absent: grays, mostly, with rare and welcome splashes of bright tones in a carpet laid down under the bleacher steps in Act I, and the chorus outfitted in striking robes...