I don’t know what she’d think of me using her book in this manner, but I did find some useful stuff. Here are a few examples:
You need to know something about animals’ color vision to predict what visual stimuli they’ll experience as high-contrast. The breakdown is pretty simple: birds can see four different basic colors (ultraviolet, blue, green, and red), people and some primates see three (blue, green, and red), and most of the rest of the mammals see just two (blue and green). With dichromatic, or two-color vision, the colors animals see best are a yellowish green (the color of a safety vest) and a bluish purple (which is close to the purple of a purple iris). That means that yellow is the high-contrast color for almost all animals. Anything yellow will really pop out at them, so you have to be careful about yellow raincoats, boots, and machinery.
Clearly I can have a character – and I think just one or maybe two at the moment – have color fixations. No matter what I do, I need to amp up the visual universe in Doleful Creatures.
For a normal human being, almost nothing in the environment pops. That means it’s practically impossible for a human being to actually see something brand-new in the first place. People probably don’t like novelty any more than animals do, but people don’t get exposed to much novelty, because they don’t notice it when it’s there. Humans are built to see what they’re expecting to see, and it’s hard to expect to see something you’ve never seen. New things just don’t register.
Again, amping up the visual world is going to help a ton. My characters have got to notice things that I would not notice. So I’m going to have to think hard about the kinds of things they should notice.
The price human beings pay for having such big, fat frontal lobes is that normal people become oblivious in a way animals and autistic people aren’t. Normal people stop seeing the details that make up the big picture and see only the big picture instead. That’s what your frontal lobes do for you: they give you the big picture. Animals see all the tiny little details that go into the picture.
Again, emphasis on that visual world, and the itty-bitty thing that make it up, not just the big picture.
Every year several ranchers are dairymen are killed by cattle challengers, and it’s my opinion that the best way to prevent dangerous attacks on people is to raise highly social grazing animals like cows and horses strictly with their own kind. They should look up to people as a benevolent higher power. You don’t want a cow directing any cow aggression at humans.
This is why The Lady shows up as a woman when she wants to be highly persuasive. She wants to be seen as that higher power. That some animals – like Jarrod – can see through the disguise to the worm/dragon she is kinda spoils things for her. Hence part of the continued animosity. This is something I need to put greater emphasis on.
In. Dr. [Joseph] LeDoux’s [researcher into the neurology of fear at New York view, this is one reason why therapists see so many fears without any obvious cause in their patients. What they’re seeing are secondary downstream fears that developed after the conscious-content of the original fear was forgotten. Th new fears are like stand-ins, or substitutions, for the old one. This may sound strange, but it happens a lot, especially to people with phobias. As Dr. LeDoux says, “phobics can sometimes lose track of what they are afraid of.”
Another character trait to work with on Jarrod. He’s so frightened of everything he’s not really sure what he’s frightened of anymore.
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