And this, Ladies and Gentleman, is why "westerners" don't get "ladder-breakers", the notion of effects from a distance is simply alien to them.

Take a look at this image for a few moments and think about what you see.



This kind of image is discussed in my Chinese language textbook, in a section titled "Traditional Chinese paintings differ from oil paintings." The text points out that traditional Chinese art often makes use of blank space, which allows the viewer to infer the background. Did you think about the wind? About the speed of the horse? The surface of the ground? time of day? Whether the horse was running in a flat or mountainous region?

I wouldn't say that Westerners can't or don't infer the background when they see an image of a running horse, but it wouldn't surprise me if they spent less time imagining it than a Chinese person would. A person spends more time and energy thinking about something that they find interesting, and it is likely that they will discover more facets about that something than someone who doesn't find it as interesting. The suggestion is that attention to the background, the circumstances in which an object exists, is of greater interest to an Asian person than to a Westerner. A ladder breaker is simple, whole board thinking is not. Is is so abstruse to think that someone whose natural inclination is to pay attention to the whole picture might be better at finding more important facets of the global position during a local fight?

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Patience, grasshopper.

Indeed, space is a very deep subject, in art and in design.

Just another fun tidbit about faces and backgrounds.

Researchers at Princeton have "set out to build a tool that could show people what their brains are doing in real time, and signal the moments when their minds begin to wander." Their method involves showing people images of faces superimposed on backgrounds. The people being tested are asked to press a button if the face is female. Using an MRI-like device, the testers monitor when your attention starts drifting from the face. "Whenever you start spacing out, it detects more “scene” than “face” in your brain signal, and tells the program to make the faces you are watching grow dimmer."

In other words, the researchers define attention as one's ability to focus on the mundane task of confirming the obvious while ignoring surrounding information. Western bias?

Quotes from: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... ne/385284/

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Patience, grasshopper.

Interesting article and interesting idea of yours.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).