Perceptions

I can't tell you how many times in my life I have found some particular noise to be annoying, or some particular thing to be slightly off in a photograph, print, or other visual medium, only to be told by others that they can't see or hear what I am talking about, or that I'm way too picky. While responding to a post a reader at dpreview.com had made asking about the noise the image stabilization motor in his lens was making it dawned on me: it may not be a matter of being "anal", or picky, but rather it might be a physiological difference.

In psychology it is well known that people filter out the irrelevant stimuli around them -- it is called "stimulus selection." It's what allows you to listen to a conversation in the car without processing the roar of the motor as clearly as the person talking, or what allows you to watch a baseball game without being distracted every second by what each person sitting in front of you is doing. In other words, you filter stuff out. It's how the human brain works. It occured to me that, as with anything related to the brain, people's abilities will differ. Some people will filter things out more strongly than others, or some people will be more sensitive to stimuli, depending on how you want to look at it. Either way, it may not be possible for us "picky" people to be less picky, or for less picky people to see or hear things the way we do. It may be a fundamental difference in the way our brains process what our senses feed us.