A man with a guilty conscience might momentarily mistake a stranger for his wife while entering a hotel with his mistress. The mother who is searching frantically for her missing child at a crowded department store and mistakes an unknown child for her own has almost become a cliche.

On the pattern of lapsus calami and lapsus linguae, is there a term for these revealing "slips of the eye"?

Lapsus oculi is, alas, something else: when a writer skips over a word or more when copying some text. (And, the learnèd Latinate plural of lapsus is lapsūs, because it's a fourth declension noun like apparatus.) Perhaps one cold use: mistaken identity?

Mistaken identity doesn't quite convey the idea.

Olafson says that "perceptual error has a surprising resemblance to veridical perception." That more what I mean—a kind of ocular parapraxis.

Probably the concept is too tenuous.

Um...shot in the dark here, Hydra, but it sounds like it could be that what you're talking about is more to do with the mind than the eye: that what is in our thoughts tends to "appear" in a host of things. Occurrences, conversations, etc. during the day sometimes influence what we dream at night; if you're at that "mad" stage of love, then the whole world is rosy, and every other girl is at least semi-consciously compared to your sweetie, etc.; my son drove for a private ambulance company this summer--although I had seen their ambulances around town before, this summer for the first time I saw them wherever I went!

'Mental Radar' is the term I've heard used to describe a similar phenomena. I notice it with cars more than anything--I was looking to buy a car, and looked at Saturns. Suddenly it seemed like the roads and parking lots were crammed with nothing else, I saw them everywhere. The numbers didn't change, I just suddenly noticed them.

and *that I've seen referred to, specifically, as the "Red Car Syndrome."

-joe (just the carfax) friday

Hydra: You might try entering in OneLook's Reverse Dictionary, something like

wishful mistake

...though if the answer is in there somewhere, you'll find 999 that aren't

Using its "contact us" link, Join me in my crusade to persuade OneLook to provide fewer but more pertinent responses

Occular is specifically the eye but visual involves the brain as well which is more to do with the phenomenon you describe. What about visual parapraxis?

True, but I guess "eye" is being used here synecdochically. After all, the same thing could be said of "slip of the tongue": It's not really the tongue that slips, but our conscious editorship of unconscious thoughts.

But I like "visual parapraxis".

Thanks Zed.

"visual parapraxis"? Hardly. In fact it is just the opposite.

Think about it...who is driving your car while you are talking to your girlfriend on your cellphone while eating fresh and gooey Kryspy Kreme donuts while, at the same time, you are listening attentively to your car radio as Rush Limbaugh exposes the evil designs of knee-jerk liberals?

Let me give you a hint...it ain't you!

tick-tock...tick-tock...tick-tock... I'll give you all a minute or two to guess and then I'll return and give the answer.

The superior colliculus in the brain stem.

Very good, Hydra, you are partly right.

But the superior colliculus is but a small part of a larger equation.

Ever forget a name and then later it pops into your forebrain without preamble? A set mechanism has evolved in our subconscious operating system which allows our cognitive mechanisms to select as needed from the jumble of the surrounding enviorment in order to enhance our survival.

Try this: Each day wait until some odd name or odd number or odd event repeats itself...then wait...it will threepeat.

But here is a more philosophical question...are that which we call we merely the sensing mechanisms of our own subconscious or are we the we that is in control?

Good question.

I cannot tell a lie.

I wouldn't have known the answer had I not happened to be reading the chapter "The Zombie in the Brain" in the popular book "Phantoms in the Brain" by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran.

Edit: Highly recommended by the way.

Link.

Asforme, Hydra, I can tell lies, but don't.

Thanks for recommending the book. I will order it forthwith.
What good luck, Amazon still owes me $3.95 for an overcharge on a book by R.A. Lafferty titled Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?. So in a week or so I'll read Phantoms in the Brainand report back my opinions.

Now regarding the original subject of this thread...

Does anyone else have something further to add?

.

We are the instigators of our own subconscious whether we understand it or not. Our senses take in information that we don't process immediately. Sometimes it appears when we need an answer. Sometimes at random. But our sensory experience is unique to our own actions. Dats wot I fink! By the way. All men lie!

Right on, olly! You go girl! I heard that!
Bout time someone put those muckety-mucks in their place.

Private note to olly's subcounsious:

Look! Have you noticed that your sensory-gathering external robot has been acting a bit imperial lately? Good lord man, he just called all of menkind liars! Listen. Tonight when you put little olly to sleep for his debriefing why don't you put a kindness koan in his circuits before you reset him. Your Olly will be a happier camper and you will have more time just to be you.

Don't thank me.

Private note to olly's subcounsious:

Strange, I got to work this morning and a smile randomly crossed my face.

olly: You're quite right and it's astounding how many of us--even the "highly educated"-- are totally unaware of the power of the subconscious, or apparently even of its existence. More than once I have read accounts in the daily paper, and even from Time Mag, by writers who consider dreams meaningless random musings of the sleeping mind

Olly's a girlie too?

Haha, no I's a guy! I think Themilum mistook one of my answers in a round of Hogwash for a girlie answer too. Apart from content, can you determine ones sexuality from writing? Some earlier Nom de plumes were girls pretending to be guys so as to be recognised.

There was a time when Milo tried to guess the sex of each of the folks who had submitted a defintion to Hogwash. He was right about half the time. Signigficantly, he guessed his own sex wrong. There is a program out there somewhere that purports to be able to determine the sex of the author from a large enough sample of text. We had discussed it here. Perhaps someone has it bookmarked and we can drag it back up.