Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
I found this beautifully drawn optical illusion at Mighty Optical Illusions blog, which I then promptly added to the blogroll. I love optical illusions and one of my favorite artists is MC Escher. On my more optimistic days I like to imagine that if more people were aware of the ways in which their senses and perceptions can fail to present an accurate model of the world to the brain then maybe fewer people would believe such extraordinary nonsense. And optical illusions are dramatic and fun ways of introducing people to visual perception errors. What do you think? Do optical illusions make more skeptics?
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I love optical illusions, but, what I need for teaching is an example where "common sense" fails to agree with reality. I want to show something that the students will, using their common sense, get wrong, but a subsequent measurement/experiment (something simple, like counting or using a ruler) reveals that the reality is different. Any ideas? E-mail me.
Especially in regards to color vision. Even people with a decent understanding of vision tend to think of human color vision as RGB components much like the way we represent colors on a computer, when in reality the brain perceives color in relation to surrounding colors. In particular I'm thinking of Edward Adelson's checkerboard-shadow illusion where the two marked squares are perceived differently but are actually the same color. Was this what you had in mind?
That will do in a hurry.
I'd like to find a more hands-on example, where students can do the measurements and have to choose to trust either their own common sense or their own measuring skills. As in Sun circles around Earth vs. the other way round - but that is hard to prove quickly indoors.
The more you learn about physiology and psychology, you get evidence amassing showing that our reality is just our perception, and I think you can have a great breakthrough.
Although, I've also had really bad moments-demonstraing things, only to have a student flat out refuse to believe it. As in "Nuh-uh. That isn't true." It makes me almost violent. But-those students are few and far between.
