Suitable masks
I thought: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." [95]
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.
posted by JohnM @ 23:55
2 Comments:
i don't think your mind necessarily waits to do this. that's just how it works. schema. shortcuts. cookie cutter people. it's not just that the deaths of everyone you knew and loved depresses you into apathy and submmission - the mind just strives to classify.
Your inner librarian is showing. :)
I think you're absolutely correct: our brains are continuously running some sort of biochemical pattern-matching algorithm, to compare what we see against what we know and have previously seen. This is probably one reason why we think we recognize people even when they're strangers. We're trying to make them conform to the extant cognitive schema we have for a person who looks like that.
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