The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

It was deeply satisfying when the morels appeared, a phenomenon you could swear was as much under their control as yours. I became, perforce, a student of the “pop-out effect,” a term I’d first heard from mushroomers but subsequently learned is used by psychologists studying visual perception. To reliably distinguish a given object in a chaotic or monochromatic visual field is a daunting perceptual task, one so complex that researchers in artificial intelligence have struggled to teach it to computers. Yet when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we’re hoping to spot—whether its color or pattern or shape—it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command. To get your eyes on is to have this narrow visual filter installed and functioning. That’s why Ben had me practice on his finds, to fix in my mind’s eye the pattern of morels as seen against the forest’s layer of duff.