On occasion, our eyes will show us things that capture the whole of our attention and render us immobile, fixated. It is possibly an instinctual response to seeing things that we have never seen before and that cannot be classified as belonging to a group of things with which we are already familiar. This latter stipulation is necessary in order to account for how undistracting a never before seen coffee mug would be to someone who was familiar with coffee mugs as a category of objects.
It is, of course, more than unclassifiable objects that can lock our gaze. Never before seen behavior, unexpected behavior, or being abruptly immersed in an unfamiliar surrounding are all capable of having the same effect, keeping our body still so as to allow our mind to devote all of its faculties to making sense of what we’re seeing.
Even imagining to great accuracy what we anticipate to see may not translate to fixation immunity when the images flood our vision, if what we’re seeing is very powerful. For example, what budding doctor hasn’t been paralyzed for a brief moment when assisting in a live birth for the first time? I use doctor instead of father here because, while the father may indeed be mesmerized, his personal involvement in the matter makes mesmerization due purely to being witness to the event less likely. The doctor has also probably spent more time imagining the details of the procedure than the father has.
What led me to write about this? Something I saw, yes, but not something that rendered me motionless (even though I was sitting calmly, I could’ve moved if I’d wanted to). I looked down at my lap, saw my jeans, the tightly woven fabric, imagined the machines that make them. The factory must always be buzzing; periodic, fast-paced clicks and less frequent but louder noises of steel clanking. A hot atmosphere, some humidity from steam. But what about at night, when the electricity is cut? Some factories run non-stop, but others surely do not. The machines, once whirring at 10,000 rpm, now are still. There is not a sound, the lights are off, the place is vacant of people. If I walked into such a scene, I would be paralyzed for some time. It would be a shock in two ways:
1. An unfamiliar surrounding
2. An atmosphere that is contrary to the non-stop high-energy atmosphere one imagines a factory to have.