People with dyslexia, who have a bias in favor of the visual periphery, can rapidly take in a scene as a whole — what researchers call absorbing the "visual gist".
Juxtaposed with an excerpt from that film, which rocked the world with its vision of hedonistic celebrity culture unencumbered by religious guilt, is a fragment from a Pietro Germi film in which a rural, tradition-bound Sicilian audience takes in a scene of "La Dolce Vita" in stunned silence.
Instead of taking in a whole scene afresh each moment, as if it had never encountered anything like it before, the brain focussed on the news: what was different, what had changed, what it didn't expect.
The view from Officer Gonzalez's roof took in a scene of devastation.
"There it is," he said, sweeping his arm to take in a scene that emerges for only a few weeks each year: the shallow, sluggish river pooling behind what looked like a makeshift V-shaped dam stretching 200 feet, bank to bank.
Joseph Fuqua, one of the male leads, appeared not to have injured himself in an inadvertent fall he took in a scene where he was berated for overly imbibing.
That has since become my general rule: No photography allowed unless I have taken in a scene for several minutes with my own eyes and then have time to slowly create a photograph that would actually be worth sharing.
Just taking in the scene.
Khadra Mohamud stood in Rep. Ilhan Omar's brand-new congressional office Thursday, taking in a new scene in American politics — a crowd of supporters, the majority of them women, many of them in hijabs, celebrating the swearing-in of a Muslim woman as a member of Congress.
As mother and son stood back, taking in a Nativity scene caked in blood and talking about violence, he figured that's exactly what the artist intended.
He, too, has the gift of taking in the details of a scene at a glance, and knowing instinctively just what must be corrected".
