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Levitin's Observance Of Motion Pictures

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According to Levitin, there are many things that exist only because of the human body and (biologically) what is inside our heads. He points out the Newtonian observation that there is no color in light. Color occurs inside our brains and it results from the interaction of observed wavelengths with our eyes. In a like manner, sound exists because of the brain’s response to vibrating molecules. Music exists only because of our interaction with it. Ironically, there are many vibrations that are out of the range of our hearing. High school students have been setting their ringtones for the last few years to a sound that adults over the age of 30 are unable to hear. If we can’t hear it, does it make noise? Well, if you’re over 30, you …show more content…

Motion pictures are not really motion at all. They are a series of still shots, put together at a rate that is beyond the capacity of our visual system to separate. Older movies seem choppy to us because their speed is too slow and we can still detect the ‘stillness’ of the shots. Once movies were shot at the rate of 24 frames per second, they went beyond out range. The result is that the visual display seems to be in motion (p. 26). Doesn’t this idea seem to be eerily similar to Zeno’s paradox of the flying arrow? Basically the paradox, from Socratic times, states that “it is impossible for a thing to be moving during a period of time, because it is impossible for it to be moving at an indivisible instant” (Mazur, 2007, p.4). What if all motion we perceive, not just motion pictures, is because the still shots are stacked too closely to each other for us to be able to resolve them visually? Is reality really nothing more that a series of moments, moving (perhaps vibrating) too quickly for us to make the distinction? If so, is time really the 4th dimension? Perhaps its motion and the passage of time is the illusion that results from

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