Is a rose, just a rose?
Be the first VIP to comment »
I think we have all heard of the infamous Rorschach inkblot test. And I don’t know if it’s still used in standard psychology but I will continually find it interesting. As long as I live.
As you probably know, the Rorschach test consists of random inkblots on paper. You look at it and tell the person conducting the test what you see. Then they decide what’s going on inside your head.
Now the official explanation from Wikipedia:
The Rorschach inkblot test is a method of psychological evaluation. Psychologists use this test to try to examine the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. The Rorschach is currently the second most commonly used test in forensic assessment, after the MMPI, and is the second most widely used test by members of the Society for Personality Assessment. It has been employed in diagnosing underlying thought disorder and differentiating psychotic from non-psychotic thinking in cases where the patient is reluctant to openly admit to psychotic thinking.
Critics of the test have raised questions about the extraction of objective meaning from responses to inkblots; the objectivity of psychologists administrating the test; inter-rater reliability; the verifiability and general validity of the test; bias of the test’s pathology scales towards greater numbers of responses; the limited number of psychological conditions which it accurately diagnoses; the inability to replicate the test’s norms; its use in court-ordered. evaluations; and the proliferation of the ten inkblot images, potentially invalidating the test for those who have been exposed to them
Okay, so it’s probably not used as often as it was due to all of the controversy about the objectivity, but I still think it’s interesting. Every where I go, I see fun images in ordinary things.
The best example I can provide is this painting my kid made a couple of years ago. I think she was four at the time. Anyway, she was painting away with water colors and a paint brush and then she finished. As it was drying I was looking at it and told her I saw a dog.
She asked where, and I pointed out where I saw the floppy ear of the dog, at least where I thought I saw the floppy ear. Then she said she saw it, too. I told her I thought it would be fun if she took a crayon and drew the outline of the dog on top of the paint, once it dried. So she did, and this is what we now have hanging on the wall.
As you can tell, she was into jamming the paint brush straight on to the paper and then twirling it, so the brush fanned out in a circle. She’s not as violent in her painting now that she’s seven.
Anyway, as I am wont to do, I was searching my brain cells for another example of seeing-other-things-in-ordinary-images. And I remembered seeing the little symbol for the television on the handrail of my hospital bed while I was in active labor with my first kid.
Upon sitting upright, this is what the television looked like. See the universal symbol for the legs of the TV on the bottom there?
But when I was lying sideways, in agony feeling the baby “descend,” I saw this version.
I was lying on my left side and while I was trying to roll with the intense pain of delivering a baby sans pain medication, I was looking at that television symbol. Soon I saw a face, with two eyes and an open screaming mouth.
Yes, it was most definitely a face in agony — like I was — with the mouth wide open screaming in pain. No, I did not scream while giving birth. I did grunt and an occasional moan escaped my lips, but I’m not a screamer.
That image has always hung with me as I find it so interesting. Obviously I was in intense pain and that’s what my brain registered — pain. So the TV symbol became a face in pain.
Isn’t that wild?
***
p.s. I’m giving this marketing website Buzzfuse a whirl in an attempt to find more readers. Mr. C thought that button meant this (and yesterday’s post about spraying the dogs with the hose) was a sponsored post. It’s not.
This is another social networking site. You click the button to “vote” for my post. If I gain popularity at that site, other people who are registered at the site will see my post and come visit me here.
Eventually I will take over the internet and rule the world! Oops that was Plankton talking.
I’m just trying to find more readers. That’s all.
