Probably questions for a couple of scientists, but. . .

[Stephen Pruitt]

. . . how is it that, in life, we aren't bothered by light color differences (our brains quickly adjusting to the different white balances), but when watching a film our brains don't seem to make the same adjustments.

Similarly, we go into a noisy location and our minds immediately filter out the noise so we can hear people talking, but when watching a film recorded in a very noisy environment, we don't seem to be able to filter out the same noise.

These questions have bothered me for some time, so maybe one of you scientific-minded lads and lassies can clear them up for me.

Happy New Year to you all!

Stephen

 

[M Harvey]

I also think these are fascinating questions, Stephen.

Certainly I don't have answers, but I think looking into the neuroscience and psychology on the concepts of "attention" and "attenuation" might offer some basis on which to find answers. (If I'd taken a neuroscience course earlier in college, I might not be spending my life hauling around a tripod!)

A trained scientist would be appalled by my crude summary, but here goes: one broad insight of modern neuroscience is how much information our senses take in that never reaches our conscious minds. Attention is the guiding of what information comes into our consciousness. Attenuation is the process of stimuli attracting less attention. (While our mind does adjust quickly, there's sometimes a transitional period where you notice ugly fluorescent light or a noisy room-- before, say, you lock into conversation with a friend or begin to enjoy the cup of coffee you ordered.) The word is so full of information, that our brain has have selection processes to make it a comprehensible thing that we can effectively move through.

As for movies: there's much to say-- and for scientists to learn-- about how artistic products address our neurological system. But it does seem fair to say that the re-presentation of reality in a film interrupts or alters these neurological processes. On the one hand, part of the magic of film is that it hugely reduces the amount of information put before our senses (as compared to reality). A film says "look over here, listen to this, and don't worry about how hot it was (though we might suggest it through lighting)." But that means our brain also doesn't get the other cues it uses to shape our attention in the real world.
Further: to some degree, most artistic products (like a film or painting) can be treated as an object of study, and that differs from how we frame reality. ("Study" might be another way of saying "pay attention to.") So we might be instructing our brains to pay more attention to visual and auditory subtleties when we look at art, because "it's all important" in a way that reality is not.

Related observations:
-Training has a lot to do with it as well. You or I are more likely to notice differences in light color than an untrained person sitting next to me, just as a painter might notice-- and represent-- how red or green a particular kind of light really is. This is significantly a matter of attention as well.
-There's probably a little more to the issue of sound. I've heard reports from hearing aid users that they have lost some ability to understand a conversation in a crowded restaurant. So I have to imagine that one additional factor is a very sophisticated set of neurological "filters" that help us understand voices in a noisy environment (e.g. relationship between vision and sound, ability to de-emphasize reflected sound versus direct sound, etc.)

Ok, I'd better cut myself off. Interested to hear if other people have better answers!

 

[Stephen Pruitt]

Thanks, Mr. Harvey! I think you're definitely on to something there, and I really appreciate your insights. I got a Ph.D. back in 1987, but it was in finance and economics, and so of no absolutely use to answer these sorts of questions.

I will also say that, for me to seriously study a really good film (art house in my case, since that's all we watch), I have to watch it with the audio turned off. . . otherwise I keep finding myself getting lost in the story instead of paying attention to the blocking or lighting. I ALWAYS notice the production design and acting, since these are inescapable to me and I know how hard the former is to get "just right" and how rare the latter is, but I seldom "see" the lighting or cinematography unless I really concentrate, which is both a blessing and a curse. . . a blessing in that I can still really enjoy a great film. . . and a curse in that I almost never learn anything with respect to lighting from watching these films, so my inherent cinematography skills don't really improve (but I suspect my filmmaking chops might; my wife and I just make features. . . we've never worked on any other types of projects at all).

Thanks again for starting me off on the right foot here!

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I think I've cracked it - to some degree at least. When we are looking at screens, we are looking at them in a greater context. That's why our eyes don't apply their own 'white balance'.

 

[Sabovic Adis]

I'm not really surprised by our ability to distinguish a recording from reality - if we couldn't, we'd be living in the Matrix without even knowing it...

 

[Audy Erel]

Yeah, weird phenomenon.. to oversimplify this, maybe it's because when watching a movie we seen and heard through someone else's eyes (the camera) and ears (the microphones), thus bypassing a lot of the usual work inside the brain and forcing someone else's perception of reality as oppose to experiencing them and processing all the organic data first hand. The already captured discrete information then displayed on screen and blasts through speakers with all their medium quirks and limitations, let alone infused with fabrications like color grading or synthesized sound effects engineering. In analogy, the brain is spoon fed with the irreversible 8-bit JPEG/h.264 and the lossy MP3s instead of the uncompressed raw RGB data or LOG format and 32-bit float audio files, where it's really good at processing those! It will struggle to reverse the loss in compression and redefine the already defined, forced 'reality'.

 

[Howie Roll]

Our eyes adjust to screens just as in real life. It’s just that the ambient lighting in RL rarely changes hundreds or thousands of K in an instant. If ambient lighting instantly switches from 3200 to 5600 one will notice. Stare at your cool grade for a couple minutes then switch back to the clean look, the clean look will at first seem warm because your eyes have adjusted to the screen.

Good Luck

 

[Ruben Stuveling]

Just to add to this topic: what is cool about our hearing is that it is able to very accurately pinpoint the source of a sound (especially everything above 100hz). I believe it's even down to a fraction of a degree if you imagine a 360 degrees circle around your head. Which means if you are talking to a person your brain can very accurately understand what the location is of the person versus all the noise that surrounds you. Combining this information with the information that is being said by the person and your brain can separate the person from the noise.

The problem when watching a movie is that the sound of both the person and the noise is usually coming from the same 2-3 speakers in front of you. And the person talking plus the noise is maybe even coming from the same speaker. So this makes it much harder for your brain to separate because it doesn't have the 'location of source' information (at least no unique location information of the person and of the noise).