The Jig - A lively dance with leaping movements

The goal of this section is to get you to appreciate what your eyeballs, brain, and mind have to do to read text. Once you can see and feel that, you will understand the basic premise of Text File Explorer. Eventually the name of this section will become clear.

The human vision system can be thought of as having an instinctive brain and a conscious mind. The conscious mind is your awareness to your environment. The instinctive brain senses objects a fraction of a second sooner than the conscious mind. If the instinctive brain senses something that provokes an action, that action will be initiated before the conscious mind receives input. Think of a ball coming towards your head and you do not see it coming. If right before it hits your head your instinctive brain senses it (through peripheral vision) , your hand will start the move to stop the ball before your conscious mind even knows it is coming.

Your conscious mind can only focus on one thing.  There are some from our species that believe they can exceed one. That is an illusion. That one thing you are concentrated on can be an image you see or it could be something in your minds eye that has you focused internally.  When you are focused, your heart doesn’t stop because it has a background neural circuit that controls it.  It works all the time. It does not need your conscious thoughts to keep it pumping.

Besides keeping your heart pumping, there are background neural circuits that constantly process the visual information being transmitted down the optic nerve.  These are circuits that receive information before the visual cortex at the back of the brain gets them.  There are thousands of these circuits, all working all the time waiting for the right input to fire it.  They are part of your subconscious mind. Your fight or flight circuits.

Understanding how human vision works helps us understand what types of things we can do that will leverage the more primal instinctual human vision capabilities and limitations. In essence, we are leveraging the fact that our eyeballs, brain, and mind operate more efficiently when not bothered by those overriding instinctive circuits operating in parallel outside our focused attention and conscious control.

A good place to start explaining how our vision works is with the eyeballs, and more specifically the fovea’s. There is one in each eye and they are high fidelity sensory inputs. They are at the front end of all visual memories, and contribute immensely to object recognition for our visual awareness. Most people will think that what they see in their conscious visual awareness is all coming in like a video camera. It is not. It is an illusion.

The fovea’s roam around the visual scene in front of you in a jerky fashion. This movement is called fixations and saccades. The fixations are when the fovea takes a snapshot the size of your thumb nail held at arms length. The saccades are the movement of the fovea to a new location. The movement of the fovea is determined in our automatic and instinctual brain first, then our conscious intention second. Scientific American describes this as

Human vision is a rhythmic alternation between looking intently and rapidly finding a new target, looking intently at that target, then rapidly shifting yet again. We take in a scene in multiple scattered snapshots that the brain stitches together into a seamless image.

So what does this have to do with reading text? If you hold your thumb up and place it over your display and a line of text, you get the idea of how much the fovea can focus on in one fixation. Next focus your fovea’s on the start of a line of text and move to the right reading as you go. What your fovea’s experience is a rather bumpy ride. Even though your intensions are to move them smoothly across the page, the instinctual fovea movements are constantly being fired in a very busy visual scene. That bumpiness is your eyes being pulled up and down. Words for example show up consciously from the lines below and above. It is hard not to notice them. This means you spend subconscious and conscious energy to filter only what your intensions want you to see. This makes reading a bit harder than it would seem. It is also very error prone. How many times have you read a sentence, and then read it again getting something different.

In Text File Explorer, we present the currently selected line in the Display as a vertical set of words. We call these tokens. A token is simply a consecutive set of characters from the line of text. The tokens are extracted using simple user defined extraction rules. This way you only see what you want and get rid of the visual distractions. The distractions removed are from the lines above and below, and the uninteresting character sequences in the line you are reading. The vertical line of tokens reduces the number of fixations and saccades required as we have made the noise go away, amplify what we wanted to see, and reduced the area the saccades and fixations have to scan. This reduces tremendously the amount of neural processing energy consumed, and leaves more for your conscious intentions.

The tokens extracted from the selected line of text in the Display we call line tokens. The line tokens become instant drilldown targets. Just one simple click. There are no human mechanical movements required like typing or human visual text processing looking for something to drilldown on. Change the selected line and you will get a new set of line tokens.

There is another kind of token we call the view token. The view tokens are simply an aggregation of the line tokens from each line in the View. For duplicate tokens we keep a count. This way we have a count of how many times that token was encountered in the whole View. By being able to sort the tokens by text or count provides an insight simply not provided in the common text editor. The view tokens also become instant drilldown targets. We call this the high fidelity lens.

I can’t know exactly what you felt when trying to read a line of text in the middle of a display of text, a very messy visual scene. I can tell you what I feel. I feel my eyeballs and their respective fovea’s are performing the jig, and wasting too much energy on visual distractions not relevant to the conscious intention.