A Picture Poser

This picture (taken in The Missing Bean, in Oxford —coffee and service both good, and it's  just across the way from Lincoln College) enables you to imagine I don't have a beard. Our perceptual experience of objects leads us to 'construe' what we see (so much for 'objective' reality'!). As most people are pogonally challenged those who have not seen me before naturally fill in the missing part beardlessly. Those who know me fill it in with a beard. But, of course, I might have shaved in the mean-time. 


This phenomenon of 'filling-in'— or 'perceptual completion' as it is called in the trade—is made more visible when it fails, as with this photo of a ho-o-o-rse doing the rounds on the Internet, or when a picture is ambiguous. Without this 'filling in' we could not 'see' pictures or cartoons or photographs at all.



But I digress. The motivation for the picture isn't pictorial or psychological, but enigmatic.  Solve the easy clue!

(6, 3, 5)