Can you really trust your eyes?
Posted on 19. Feb, 2010 by Rick in Brain Research, TED, puzzles, video | 0 comments
Optical Illusions. I’ve been hooked on them since I was a kid. They’re sort of like jokes for the eyes. I always love the mental conflict I feel when I try to resolve what I am seeing with what I know should be there.
I fell in love with optical illusions when my Dad brought home an engineering drawing from his work that showed a mythical part for a large electrical plant that was an impossible combination of three bolts at the bottom and two bolts at the top (it was an engineers variation on the well known five-legged elephant optical illusion). I remember looking at this drawing over and over again trying to figure it out, trying to make it make sense. I’d start at the top of the drawing, it was two bolts attached to a single bar. Easy enough to understand. Then I’d follow the lines down and suddenly there were three sets of threads. My mind would jump to make sense of the image. So I’d start scanning up following the lines of three bolt shafts until there suddenly would only be two bolts connecting at the top. It was magic for my eyes. Years later, I discovered the drawings of MC Escher.
Now with my passion for discovering the way the brain works , I find optical illusions to be very revealing about how we think and just how tenuous our reality really is.
So sit back and enjoy this 15 minute TED video from February 2004 filmed in Monterey, California as Al Seckel, a cognitive neuroscientist, explores with his audience the perceptual illusions that fool our brains. To make it easier to see the optical illusions you might wish to watch the video in full-screen mode by clicking the icon in the upper right corner of the video window.
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