Fast Looks

The way to see most is not to look too long. So believes Ohio State's Professor Samuel Renshaw, who recently won his university a Navy "Mark of Commendation" for training soldiers and sailors to do their looking fast.

Professor Renshaw has proved that the human eye, properly trained, can observe instantly a complicated object (such as a tank or an airplane) and impress it as a whole upon the mind. At his Navy Recognition School at Columbus, Ohio, he taught 4,000 officers from all branches of the armed services how to do this trick. As graduate instructors, they trained servicemen to tell friend from foe before the foe got too close.

Basic tool of Renshaw's method is a gadget for flashing images briefly on a screen. Students are given no time to ponder details; they have to grasp the whole picture fast. Renshaw starts them off with a four-digit number, showing it for 1/50th of a second. As the students learn, the numbers get longer. A student recently reproduced a twelve-digit number (568790154123) after looking at it for less than a second.

This training was easily applied to recognition of aircraft. Untrained pilots, shown pictures of planes for 1/75th of a second, named only one out of three. After training, the score of most increased to 80%. Professor Renshaw is now using his method in the peacetime job of speeding up sluggish readers. One student ("just a nice girl, no genius"), after 33 sessions with the flashing screen, speeded her reading of "heavy literature" 109%.

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