Reality Sets In

I just finished reading a book of short stories by Stephen King, Just After Sunset. I wouldn’t say they were all short exactly, but definitely shorter than a novel or even a novella, especially one of Stephen King’s.

Anyway, Stephen King definitely has a way of weaving a tale that can make you laugh, cry, and scare you at the same time.

I’m not a huge fan of the horror genre, or even fantasy in general (though I did love Tigana, but I’ll have to cover that at a different time), but I’m always a fan of a story that makes me think. It is rare for him to fail to make me think. It may be something as simple as a character byplay that excites the anthropologist in me. Or a riddle contest with an intelligent machine to pique my scientific mind. Whatever it is, he just seems to pick the right words for the occasion.

The word of his I’m fixated on at the moment is “thinness”. He has an idea that sometimes reality is a bit thin in parts. And it makes a lot of sense. How often have we just gone through the day, or even just a drive to or from work that you don’t remember — because you were in another world. But not really, right? But what is real. I don’t mean in the the existential sense, but rather in the conscious sense. Your reality is your own perception, and when your mind is in another place — not on the task at hand — you, the essence of you, are not doing the task at hand. Oh sure, your body is, but you — and the consciousness that defines you — aren’t.

The world around us defines a basic reality, and everybody experiences the same world. However, not everybody experiences that world in the same way. Our brain fools us a lot of the time. It’s really great at filling in any missing gaps. If we had to pay attention to every single pixel of our visual input, every frequency change of our auditory system, or the nerves on just the tips of our fingers — much less all of our skin — we’d get nothing meaningful done. So, our brain cuts down on the noise, breaks down the important things, and gives us a movie to watch.

There’s a hell of a lot more going on around us than our conscious mind can see, so for us, our conscious reality is thin. If we think of it as bandwidth, we have a pretty high bandwidth of sensory input, but our consciousness — the movie-watcher — gets only a tinny picture. Its bandwidth is thinner.

Now imagine a world where the picture and sound start out with limited bandwidth. It’s really not hard to imagine: watch a VCR tape or some old Super-8 film. It’s amazing what we used to live with, when today we have the Flip HD camcorder that fits in the palm of your hand and can store up to 120 minutes of 720p video. The resolution gets higher, so our mind doesn’t have to fill in so many gaps. The picture inside our head gets thicker and richer and more real.

This is especially true as our devices get better as well. The iPhone brought a very high resolution screen to a small device. This doesn’t seem like it makes much of a difference, especially when our fingers aren’t getting any smaller, so it’s not like we can fit more on the screen, no matter what the resolution. Plus, a better resolution doesn’t mean you can make the type smaller – then people can’t read it! But what a better resolution can do is make the experience feel better. This is because even if we wouldn’t be able to read smaller type, our eyes can pick up subtleties that our conscious brain doesn’t even notice. Again, it means that our brain doesn’t have to fill in as many gaps, so we don’t have to concentrate so hard on the details.

I was really hoping the iPad would make a big leap in the experience of computing on a handheld device. But the resolution just isn’t there. They should cram more pixels in to make a 3D-like interface really feel awesome, even if you can’t do anything more with those pixels than eye candy. It’s the richness – the thickness – of the experience that matters. Apple usually gets this, but I think they’ve pushed it out a bit early.

One more observation and then I’ll shut up. If you listen to music today and compare it with the past, it seems much more there than before. Part of it may be the media, but a lot of us listen to music on MP3 players that don’t have the digital clarity of a CD. A lot of it has to do with style – the Beatles have a different sound than bands today. But even the simpler sounds of today are richer. Even more of that has to do with audio equalization – the soft and loud parts of the song are equalized more closely together. Some people say that it muddles the sound, but our ears and brains can distinguish very slight variations in amplitude, and it does so even better when there isn’t a really loud sound next to a really soft sound. Therefore, to our ears, it is a richer experience.

With a richer experience from a richer input – visual, aural, tactile – comes a reality that is experienced in a richer way by our conscious brain, especially when the original was recorded months or years before and all we have to begin with is a reproduction. When much of our life is spent working at a computer, watching television and movies, or chatting on the phone with family and friends, the better we can make those experiences, the better our reality is.

A long time ago, we spent a lot of time in reality – working fields and hunting for food, communicating with our loved ones face-to-face. Now, most of our time is spent with the virtual systems we have in place. Once we make those systems good enough, reality will truly set in.

Consumer/Producer

My how times change. It's been forever since I've sat down and written anything much longer than 140 characters. Even if it's just to introduce a video or pictures of my son, it's still not very long.

I'm going to remedy that. I've been in consume mode for far too long, it's time for me to produce.