How Much Do We Really See?

After a chat with Rosie about my ideas, I started talking about how much of what we remember did we actually see, and how much have we made up? It came as something I was thinking about in terms of fragmented memory and how the brain remembers. Looking at cases of complete falsified memories was really intriguing. I thought perhaps for a film idea I could explore this in an experimental way, so I started researching the topic.

Take a look at this information I found in an online article, which you can view here:

Picture the following, and prepare to be amazed. You're walking across a college campus when a stranger asks you for directions. While you're talking to him, two men pass between you carrying a wooden door. You feel a moment's irritation, but they move on and you carry on describing the route. When you've finished, the stranger informs you that you've just taken part in a psychology experiment. "Did you notice anything change after the two men passed with the door?" he asks. "No," you reply uneasily. He then explains that the man who initially approached you walked off behind the door, leaving him in his place. The first man now comes up to join you. Looking at them standing side by side, you notice that the two are of different height and build, are dressed differently, have different haircuts and different voices.
It sounds impossible, but when Daniel Simons, a psychologist at Harvard University, and his colleague Daniel Levin of Kent State University in Ohio actually did this experiment, they found that fully 50 per cent of those who took part failed to notice the substitution. The subjects had succumbed to what is called change blindness. Taken with a glut of recent experimental results, this phenomenon suggests we see far less than we think we do.
Rather than logging every detail of the visual scene, says Simons, we are actually highly selective about what we take in. Our impression of seeing everything is just that-an impression. In fact we extract a few details and rely on memory, or perhaps even our imagination, for the rest. Others have a more radical interpretation: they say that we see nothing at all, and our belief that we have only to open our eyes to take in the entire visible world is mistaken-an illusion.

Looking at this, it seems that there's a potential for breaking down what we see and what we actually remember. I can recall parts of my own past in which I can remember something being one colour, when in fact it was another and events which never happened in a particular place, but did happen somewhere else. This kind of thought leads me to La Jetee, which has a very static feel as it tells a narrative using images, which gives you time to view the whole image and maybe playing with the frame rate of a sequence might give a perspective on that. This is very much like 24 hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon, which is Pyscho by Alfred Hitchcock stretched to be 24 hours. In observing each frame you realise something you never did before when watching the film.

Also this makes me think of a video I saw many years ago which, like the article at the beginning of this post, shows what we do and don't see:

Not only this, but film-makers use techniques all the time to lead your eye and hide things that aren't quite right, and magicians do this too. It's such an interesting part of human psychology and I want to explore it further. Perhaps I could explore what other animals see compared to us? There are certain light waves we can't see too, what would the world look like through the eyes of something else? How much and what would we remember then?