Yesterday I showed a demo to a colleague, in which I spoke to my web browser, and the text that I was speaking showed up in a 3D scene. He was astonished. His exact words were “That’s amazing!”
A few minutes later I pointed out to him that both he and I do this all the time on our phones. We talk into them, and our speech gets converted immediately into text.
“Oh, right,” he said. Until then he hadn’t made the connection. Seeing text show up in a 3D scene in a web browser in response to somebody talking at their computer was out of context, and therefore somehow startling.
I wonder how often this happens to us in our lives. Something that in one context would seem perfectly prosaic, in a different context appears, at least at first, to be amazing.
I am sure that it won’t come as a surprise if I tell you that I wrote this post by talking into my phone. Nothing really amazing about that these days.
At first blush seemingly unrelated but bear with me:
A cog-sci researcher I knew gave me a Rubik’s cube that wasn’t color but texture coated — a Rubik’s cube for the blind.
The researcher asked me to solve this unusual cube but I had to shut my eyes first.
At this point in my cubing, I _thought_ I’d be able to solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded but man was I wrong. As the researcher explained, the solution I’d had internalized wasn’t mapped abstractly in my brain but only onto my visual cortex.
A similar thing may be occurring when a new context for a familiar capability (like speech to text) is experienced. Perhaps the capability _felt_ completely new to your colleague in the same way the texture cube felt completely foreign to me.
That’s fascinating! I wouldn’t have suspected that your internalized solution was mapped only to your visual cortex.