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I just started listening to this podcast several hours ago and must say I am hooked. I have never been involved with the arts and have never really been interested in grammar. I must say though, that I find this broadcast fascinating and making me interested. I was thinking about how Martha and Grant wanted a way to describe the experience of meeting someone in person for the first time when the only impression of them they have had is the radio personality they have experienced. I just wanted to see what people thought of what I came up with in a few minutes because I thought it was neat, which is the idea that you have a 'Perceptual Revision' of that person upon meeting them face to face. What does everyone or anyone think?
Cataclysmic reorientation? That describes my experience the first time I met a radio news broadcaster with whom I was preparing to perform a play. His voice, of course, was very familiar, but his appearance and demeanor were not at all as I had expected. That feeling was tempered, I think, by the fact that this was also my first close encounter with a "celebrity," an experience that no longer holds the sense of awe that it once did.
Peter
tromboniator said:
His voice, of course, was very familiar, but his appearance and demeanor were not at all as I had expected.Peter
I never met Garrison Keillor, but I listened to his voice on Prairie Home Companion for many years. When I finally saw his photo the image was not at all what I expected. Like how did that deep resonant voice come out of that head?
Maybe the term we're looking for is indeed "perceptual revision."
EmmettRedd said:
How about audio-visual dissonance (AV dissonance for short)?
Emmett
Oh yeah … now that's even better than "perceptual revision" as it plays off Piaget's "cognitive dissonance" concept, wherein a mind is presented with conflicting information that begs to be reconciled. There's no doubt this is a common experience. Could be seeing the image of what was previously only a radio personality, meeting them in person (as Tromboniator described), or coming face-to-face with someone only previously known via email. We really ought to have a word for this experience.
And so I suggest "perceptual dissonance" as a compromise blending EmmettRedd's and Busbey's offerings.
I'm not going to lobby for my suggestion (which was not serious), but I question the use of the word perceptual because the dissonance is between an imagined appearance (call it, perhaps, an expectation based on insufficient information) and a real visual one, rather than conflicting perceptual input. For most of us auditory input is the wrong source for accurate visual imagery. The auditory input doesn't conflict with the visual, it only seems to. Does this make sense?
Peter
Of course, I see now that I'm using perception only as sensory input and not as the way the brain processes it, or how we think of it. Maybe I'm wrong, but perceptual just doesn't seem right to me.
tromboniator said:
Of course, I see now that I'm using perception only as sensory input and not as the way the brain processes it, or how we think of it. Maybe I'm wrong, but perceptual just doesn't seem right to me.
Pasted from Wiki: perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses.
I see your point about voice being auditory input and not visual. But "perceptual dissonance" still works for me. On a whim I Googled it ... 1700+ hits, most of which were scholarly articles dealing with the psychology of art, optical illusions, hallucinogenic drugs, and behavioral disorders. I thought I had made up that term, but apparently many others beat me to it.
And still, I have to say, after listening to Garrison Keillor for all those years I really had a vivid mental image built up that totally conflicted with what I saw when I actually found a photo of him. I experienced dissonance as it is formally defined.
I note that AV dissonance is a specific instance of perceptual dissonance. With five senses, there could be ten specific combinations (if I did my math right). One to which Sam I Am could relate would be visual-tasty dissonance.
So, all eleven types of dissonance might have their use.
Emmett
PS Dr. Suess's Green Eggs and Ham is the referent.
EmmettRedd said:
I note that AV dissonance is a specific instance of perceptual dissonance. With five senses, there could be ten specific combinations (if I did my math right). One to which Sam I Am could relate would be visual-tasty dissonance.
There are ten combinations only if you don't want to distinguish directions, i.e. "how it looks and how it tastes don't match". Twenty if it matters to you which sense gave you the first impression: "based on how it looks, I thought it would taste different" vs "based on how it tastes, I didn't expect it to look like that". (Granted, the second of that pair is less common because we tend to see things before we put them in our mouths. Maybe you've had the experience of tasting an unfamiliar fruit in a recipe and only later discovering how funny-looking it is on the vine?)
Wouldn't that be a psychological necessity? First one experiences "AV (or perceptual) dissonance," then, after reflection/resolution, one achieves "perceptual revision." You are correct that those two terms describe different, though causally connected, states of mind.
But it seems to me this thread is drifting from its original topic, and getting more into what's called synesthesia. That's a fascinating topic too, but deals more with a neurological dysfunction than the much more common experience Busbey was talking about when he started this thread.
Or maybe synesthesia and perceptual revision just two points on a psychological continuum?
Busbey said:
I was thinking about how Martha and Grant wanted a way to describe the experience of meeting someone in person for the first time when the only impression of them they have had is the radio personality they have experienced.
I've listened to NPR's "Car Talk" on and off for over 20 years now. For nearly that long I've seen pictures of Tommy and Ray Magliozzi in NPR listener guides and on their website. A year or two ago, they were featured on public television in a NOVA special called 'Car of the Future.' I was shocked to see and hear Tommy speaking with Ray's voice and Ray speaking in Tommy's voice. For some reason, I'd never questioned my assumptions about which voice was associated with which face. I'm not sure exactly why I was so sure about that, but it goes to show that the mind can't help but fill in certain information voids with presumed conclusions.
I don't think we've gone completely over into synesthesia yet. For the "sight to taste" example, think about all the people you've heard describing their first encounter with wasabi: it looks like guacamole and therefore one expects it to taste like guacamole, which leads to a shock when it turns out to resemble horseradish.
For "sight to touch", consider how blue is used to indicate "cool", and how much trouble you had reconciling that with the fact that a blue flame is hotter than a red one.
Going back to the original case of seeing someone for the first time after only hearing a voice, with me it was Paul Harvey. After hearing him speak every morning for years while getting ready for school, I had a strange feeling when I saw him on television. It's not that he had looks inconsistent with what he sounded like, but rather the very idea that that familiar voice could actually come out of a human mouth rather than a radio speaker. (I had no such jolt when I first saw Casey Kasem; he was doing TV commercials for potato chips before I ever heard of "American Top 40". Maybe others had a different experience there, expecting him to look like Shaggy from "Scooby Doo" or Robin from "Super Friends".)
Ron Draney said:
Going back to the original case of seeing someone for the first time after only hearing a voice, with me it was Paul Harvey. After hearing him speak every morning for years while getting ready for school, I had a strange feeling when I saw him on television. It's not that he had looks inconsistent with what he sounded like, but rather the very idea that that familiar voice could actually come out of a human mouth rather than a radio speaker. (I had no such jolt when I first saw Casey Kasem; he was doing TV commercials for potato chips before I ever heard of "American Top 40". Maybe others had a different experience there, expecting him to look like Shaggy from "Scooby Doo" or Robin from "Super Friends".)
Yeah, you're probably right … synesthesia may be on the same "spectrum," but this thread (at least when it started) was talking about a distinctly different phenomenon. We're not talking about any kind of cognitive dysfunction here, but something much more common that virtually all of us have experienced at times. That's why, imho, it really needs a name to label it. In fact, I was talking to a friend who works as a counselor just yesterday. She has a degree in psychology and couldn't provide a "clinical" name for the experience, even though she immediately knew what I was talking about. She did say she liked "perceptual dissonance" though. And so I will continue to use it. Would be very cool if the term actually makes it into the vocabulary, and some day this thread is cited for its etymology, huh?
Ron, can't say I was ever a fan of Casey Kasem, but a similar thing happened to me with Larry Lujack, a DJ on WLS Chicago back in the late 60s to early 70s … the station that introduced me to rock and roll. Only in that case, he looked exactly like I envisioned him. So would that be "perceptual consonance" or perhaps "perceptual affirmation?"
BTW, tried wasabi once. Only once. I won't say what it tasted like for me.
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