As psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered over the past several decades, our consciousness provides a stable interface to a dizzyingly rich sensory world. Underneath this interface lurk two vision systems that work in parallel. Both are fed by the same two sensors, our eyeballs, yet they serve different functions. One system is responsible for visual perception and is necessary for identifying objects—such as approaching cars and potential mates. The other is responsible for action: it transforms visual input into the movements of our eyes, hands and legs. We consciously experience only the former, but we depend for our survival on both.
In layman’s terms what this means is, looks can be deceiving – understanding what’s on the inside is important, despite what you see on the outside.
With this in mind, I turn my attention to the 2014 Winter Games about to begin in Sochi. As the games draw closer an Olympic volunteer from Portland, Oregon, I was surprised to hear how many dogs are roaming around Sochi. In Sochi thousands of stray dogs live by scavenging the rubble of construction sites, begging for food.
Nadine Kincaid reported to Huffington Post Canada that “There’s a lot of dogs everywhere. Right behind where we’re staying, there’s a whole legion of dogs,” she said. “I come from a town where there’s leash laws and everyone has to pick up after their dogs, so that’s unusual to me to see that.” Nadine Kincaid also reported that she would be upset if the dogs were being poisoned. However Animal activist Dina Filippova says that city authorities are using the Olympics as an excuse to cover an ongoing practice. A lawmaker from the Krasnodar region, Sergei Krivonosov, supported the dog culling.
“We should understand that it is done not only before the Olympics but constantly,” Dina Filippova said in an interview. The Sochi Winter Games have received numerous threats. One of the biggest threats is the so-called ‘Black Widow’ – a Chechen woman named Ruzan Ibragimova, the wife of a killed Islamist militant, whom Russian authorities fear infiltrated the Olympic city before security was put up to carry out an attack. The newest warning according to The New York Daily News, is that terrorists could be smuggling explosives on to flights bound for Russia by hiding them inside of toothpaste tubes.
Image Credit: www.nydailynews.com