“Seeing is believing” is not always relevant especially when dealing with photos presented in the media. The article Photography as a Weapon is an interviewing going in depth about why people will believe just about any photo they see. The way the brain will tell you that something is true when its known that it is not is mind blowing.
Roughly 30 to 50 percent of our brain is doing visual processing. It’s just processing the visual imagery that comes in, and if you think about it in terms of bandwidth, there is a remarkable amount of information entering into our eyes and being processed by the brain….Vision is a pretty unique sense for the brain. It’s incredibly powerful and is very valuable from an evolutionary point of view. So it’s not surprising that it has an emotional effect on us.
The human brain is so powerful but still so much about it is not understood. Using photographs to entice people to think one way or another is strategic in all the worst ways. It plays on human emotion so much more than simple words do. Dictators of the past such as Mussolini and Stalin both were great public speakers but also took advantage of doctoring photographs to have even more power over their people.
The article does give a glimmer of hope against falling prey to these photo-shopped images.
Kids now are growing up in digital age where they routinely see doctored images in their mailboxes, in the media, on television, and so on and so forth.
Since the youth today is so bombarded with the fixed up images then they will be less likely to be so quick to believe everything they see. These pictures are more dangerous than most people would like to believe.