Thursday, January 19, 2006
Puzzling
We were given a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. I haven’t done one of those in years, and it may be years before I do another one. Not because it’s not absorbing. Au contraire, it’s too absorbing. It’s worse than the little “problem” I seem to have with Yahoo! Rocketmania.
What’s fascinating to me about the jigsaw is the way it focuses the attention on image details that are very arbitrarily pres
ented – things that the eye sees as a unit in the picture only rarely correspond to units that the cutting of the puzzle presents on the pieces. The information needed to solve the puzzle is presented in two ways - the two-dimensional shape of the piece and the pictorial content on the face of it. I think the fact that it is coming through these two very different modes makes it very difficult for me. I do better when I try to match by picture content or by shape, but not by both simultaneously – looking for “a large right hand knob with a little bit of gold bezel on it.”
The puzzle picture is a painting of clocks and watches (more on clocks some time – I used to collect, still have one or two around the house). This picture has become so much a part of my current reality that I actually caught myself looking at a colleague’s watch at work, thinking that might be the piece I was looking for earlier.
What’s fascinating to me about the jigsaw is the way it focuses the attention on image details that are very arbitrarily pres
ented – things that the eye sees as a unit in the picture only rarely correspond to units that the cutting of the puzzle presents on the pieces. The information needed to solve the puzzle is presented in two ways - the two-dimensional shape of the piece and the pictorial content on the face of it. I think the fact that it is coming through these two very different modes makes it very difficult for me. I do better when I try to match by picture content or by shape, but not by both simultaneously – looking for “a large right hand knob with a little bit of gold bezel on it.”The puzzle picture is a painting of clocks and watches (more on clocks some time – I used to collect, still have one or two around the house). This picture has become so much a part of my current reality that I actually caught myself looking at a colleague’s watch at work, thinking that might be the piece I was looking for earlier.
