8.4.2. How It Works
The effect is obvious. That we can perceive the human formeven mood and genderjust from moving lights demonstrates that we automatically extract underlying patterns from the normal human forms we see every day.
Through a combination of experience and specialized neural modules, we have learned the underlying commonalities of moving human formsthe relationships in time and space between the important features (the joints) of the human body. Our brain can then use this template to facilitate recognition of new examples of moving bodies. Being able to do this provides (for free) the ability to perceive a whole just from abstracted parts that move in the right way. A similar process underlies the perception of expressions in emoticons [Hack #93] . It’s the reason cartoonists and caricaturists can make a livingshowing just the essentials is as expressive, maybe even more expressive, than the full image with all its irrelevant details.
Given our brains are so good at detecting human forms, it’s surprising that emoticons are so common and stick people aren’t. Perhaps it’s because posture is secondary to facial expression, and anyway you’d need to articulate the limbs to get the full effect. Mind you, that’s not to say you can’t have dancing stick people in plain text online chat (http://bash.org/?4281).
Taken from : Mind Hacks
