Some thinking out loud.
If you try to point something out to a cat, a modernist masterpiece for instance, they will look at the tip of your finger and not the painting. I don’t think it’s because they’re uninterested.
Is it weird that we look in the direction indicated and not the finger. How do we know to do this?
We were at the theatre last night and I was thinking about the lighting. The audience follows the spot of light, we don’t look for the source. I once spent four weeks working on the crappy lighting at a crappy comedy club and for months afterwards I could no longer just look at the spots of light, I was always looking at the source. The magic was dead, I could not suspend belief and enjoy the shadows; I could only appreciate the technical.
Possibly none of these ideas are related.
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clamorouswhining liked this
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billydalto liked this
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tuixoneta said:
Funny you should mention this. Something similar happened to me: after being an extra in a few ads and appearing in some amateur films I stopped being able to just enjoy a film and instead kept wondering how the scenes would have been filmed…
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parasols liked this
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cosmopsis said:
I just wrote a long response and it disappeared. Ugh! Anyway, re: pointing, joint attention, theory of mind, etc., this is related (and made me cry): bit.ly/hq3eyU
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whenwolf said:
I read somewhere that only humans and dogs understand that you’re pointing TO something.
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nsomn said:
So what you’re saying is that cats are like crappy comedy clubs in that they both.. um.
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kitey posted this
