Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes! (1/2)

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Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes! (Part 1/2). TED talks - Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK).

A fascinating demonstration of how our visual system is conditioned by what we perceive as 'Reality', with unexpected conclusions about what we call Illusions.

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Beau Lotto's color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can't normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what's really out there.

Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto is founder of Lottolab, a hybrid art studio and science lab. With glowing, interactive sculpture -- and good, old-fashioned peer-reviewed research -- he's illuminating the mysteries of the brain's visual system.

Why you should listen to him:

"Let there be perception," was evolution's proclamation, and so it was that all creatures, from honeybees to humans, came to see the world not as it is, but as was most useful. This uncomfortable place -- where what an organism's brain sees diverges from what is actually out there -- is what Beau Lotto and his team at Lottolab are exploring through their dazzling art-sci experiments and public illusions.

Their Bee Matrix installation, for example, places a live bee in a transparent enclosure where gallerygoers may watch it seek nectar in a virtual meadow of luminous Plexiglas flowers. (Bees, Lotto will tell you, see colors much like we humans do.) The data captured isn't just discarded, either: it's put to good use in probing scientific papers, and sometimes in more exhibits.

Outside the studio work, the brain-like (that is, multidisciplinary) organization is also branching out to bigger public engagement works. It's holding regular "synesthetic workshops" where kids and adults make "color scores" -- abstract paintings that computers interpret into music, as with scrolls fed to a player piano.

And lately they're planning an outdoor walkway of color-lit, pressure-sensitive John Conway-esque tiles that react and evolve according to foot traffic. These and Lotto's other conjurings are slowly, charmingly bending the science of perception -- and our perceptions of what science can be.

Beau Lotto teaches at University College London.

"All his work attempts to understand the visual brain as a system defined, not by its essential properties, but by its past ecological interactions with the world. In this view, the brain evolved to see what proved useful to see, to continually redefine normality." (British Science Association)

• http://www.ted.com/speakers/beau_lotto.html
• http://www.lottolab.org/
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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• believe
• lying
• eyes
• optical
• illusions
• beau
• lotto
• demonstration
• reality
• games
• brain
• lottolab
• experiments
• neuro
• science

[MrJonkelp]

brilliant video

[Flusercom]

Very Infomative.. Good Vids.

[Spasatcom]

Good Video!!

[y0nd3r]

@daiitokumyouou899 I also saw green desert on the right and red desert on the left. As far as I know I don't have anything. Wonder what this might imply.

[zamordomin]

@htomerif & xQuciferx plz just send messages, lol your conversation takes up the whole page

[xQuciferx]

@htomerif I used Youtubes expand feature, and then used windows snippet tool to capture it and save to .PNG. If there is a color change in however you got the image, I think that may be isolated to how you did. I now triple checked the version I have and it they are identical in it.

I may try again tonight with 720p, maybe 320 just didn't pick up the differences.

[htomerif]

@xQuciferx I understand. Gimp has a radius average feature with its color dropper. I had it set to a 2 pixel radius around the cursor and took samples from the center of the blocks. I did my best not to cherry pick any data. Honestly I was expecting to find that you were right. There is a very real color change, though its possible its an artifact of compression. I'm not saying effects like this arent real. check out v=z9Sen1HTu5o for a similar one.

[xQuciferx]

@htomerif Guess again, the blocks aren't one solid color. They are slightly shaded. Meaning that you got different values because you just clicked on slightly different parts of the block. Try wanding the blocks with 25% tolerance(not high enough to pick up exess), and compare them side to side outside of the context of the rest of the image.

Also, a second layer with Negation mode blending will make them all turn white when you add any two together.

You have to look at all the pixels.

[htomerif]

@xQuciferx Well, I double checked too, using gimp, and I checked the before and after. RGB

Left side before: 146 150 146 Left side after: 147 149 155

Right side before: 149 151 148 Right side after: 149 151 140

My first statement was just kind of qualitative. This is quantitative. Theres a definite difference between them, and a definite deficit of blue in one and a definite excess in the other. I was all set to admit I was wrong, but I dont think so. uh.. so there.

[xQuciferx]

@htomerif You inspired me to double check. I used the wand tool on paint.net, highlighted the color blocks, and moved them over. The blue and yellow are honestly the same. All of them have an RGB value around (148,148,148), genuinely grey, and genuinely the same despite looking blue and yellow.

You were wrong.