Chapter 5 Getting the Information: Visual Space and Time
“It is one thing to say with the psalmist ‘I lift mine eyes up to the hills’ —it is another thing to drag one’s carcass up there.”
GK Chesterton paraphrased by John Prange.
Moving our eyes is the lowest-cost method we have for getting additional information about our environment. It has such a low cognitive cost that we are not even aware that we are making eye movements several times a second. In visual data searches “drag[ing] one’s carcass up there” is what we do when we search through a jumbled filing cabinet to find information, often entirely losing our train of thought in the process. It is also what we do when we travel a thousand miles to an information-sharing meeting.
Often when ...
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