SENSE PERCEPTION 6. Optical illusions show how we see

About Beau Lotto

Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist who specializes in sense perception. He is also the founder of Lottolab, a studio that blends art and science to explore how we view and interact with the world. He also helped publish the first peer-reviewed scientific paper by school children.

Why is this talk worth watching?

Lotto’s visual illusions are – literally – unbelievable. They also demonstrate just how much our sensory knowledge depends on context, a key concept to grasp.

WOKs/AOKs

SENSE PERCEPTION, human sciences, language

Questions on the talk

1	What is BL’s key idea about sensory information?	BL talks about how we cannot trust what we see as the sensory information is not trustworthy as our minds are not developed enough to understand anything to its fullest extent. There is no inherent meaning in information, but its only what we do with it that matters. We see by learning to see.	4.15
2	So how do we see?	We see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns (relationships in information) and associating it with a behavioral meaning. An example of this can be found in letter strings in language.	4.35
3	How does changing the context change what we perceive in his illusions?	It means you could take two identical things, put each in either a light or dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than the one on the light surround.	6.40
4	What is the significance of the optical illusions demonstrated by BL?	The brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful for the human race to see in the past.	11.40
5	How has BL extended the principles of what he does?	He did an experiment of which he translated light into sound, enabling people to hear their visual world, navigating the world using their ears. This was done in order to aid people with blind or hard-seeing people, but also to try and figure out how people make sense of their world. He also got a child to listen to an orchestra and paint it, as a way of trying to understand how we visually see sound.	12.15
6	What does BL say about our relationship with nature?	He states that we are defined by our environment and our interactions with it (our ecology). He then states that it is, “necessarily historical, empirical (observation), and relative”.	14.15

Related knowledge questions and discussion points

·       Can we trust our senses?

Basing the answer to his question off of BL’s talk, we cannot trust our senses because we do not fully understand the world we live in fully, meaning that our interaction with it cannot be fully understood as well. It truly relates to the last question, of which our relationship with nature comes from an interaction with it; it is empirical. To summarize, we were born with five senses given to us by nature in order to navigate through the world (i.e. sensing pain, temperature change, etc.…)

·       Is seeing believing?

Well, visual illusions can distort our perception so we can say that what we “see” is not what is physically there. An example of this can be seen when BL had conducted various experiments with color to the audience. However, an example of mine own is that in the optical illusion below, where the image itself is not animated yet it has movement that is caused by the specific placement of colors and shapes (i.e. small dots at the center create the illusion that the picture is farther away from us, whilst the edges do the opposite effect). Furthermore, belief of historical events, or meanings of certain things are made to demonstrate that visual belief is just an interpretation, not actual sight. It’s a confusing concept, but then again you have to ask yourself if blue is actually blue? We only know blue itself because we have classified it, and we choose to see it as blue.

·       What are implications of the flawed way in which we view the world?

This is a difficult question, because it asks to draw a conclusion as to what the effect of seeing a ‘flawed’ view of the world is. Of course, a significant disadvantage is that every human develops a certain distrust in their surroundings and therefore it can affect the psyche of the person in a negative way. For example, a person might have absolutely no faith in what is around them that they will (at least mentally) cease to find meaning in their life. As, our surroundings form experiences with our interactions with it, and so it waters our perception of life. Another implication is that we know less of our world, meaning that humans are limited to understanding our world from a perspective that is unbiased as our own personalities are shaped with the nature of which we were brought in, meaning that almost all decision is influenced by our emotions and rational way of thinking. Of course, these are merely guesses.