Wednesday, March 4, 2015

The eyes are much more emotional

Sometimes the counter on my microwave reaches zero yet still takes a couple seconds before it sounds the beeping melody of completion.  This is irrelevant if I am sitting in the other room and only have the sound of the beep to tall me the microwave has completed it's function.  However, once I was looking at the microwave, I saw that the counter was at zero so I naturally placed my hand on the door handle so I could open the door the retrieve the contents therein.  To my surprise I found myself frozen in that state because the the beep still hadn't sounded.  It took so long to sound although my visual system was staring at a big 0 that I began to feel like an ass with my hand on the handle doing nothing.  By the time the beep caught up with the 0 displayed on the timer I was furious.

My eyes gave me the sign that the microwave was done yet my ears wouldn't let me continue until it also received its own sign.  This false expectation induced by my eyes caused me to quickly lose my patience.  If it had happened the other way around, if the microwave had beeped seconds before the timer had reached zero thus causing my eyes to wait for their signal, would I have been equally perturbed at the microwave's incompetence?  Perhaps I would have found it comical....I must re-engineer this faulty microwave and find out.

As humans I think we are much more dependent on our eyes than any other sense.  We believe the things we see with much more faith than information received from the other senses.  I think this reliance causes us to become much more emotionally attached to our visual system than any other.  Any discrepancy, for example seeing the timer saying zero yet the microwave not dinging, therefore would likely be met with much more emotion.  Hence I got so frustrated.

1 comment:

  1. The first paragraph is hilarious. I'm talking LOL, baby! Seriously.

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