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Optical illusions show how we see | Beau Lotto

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  • Recommended by 1 person, in Hacker News.
  • Presented by Beau Lotto, as the video describes them

For anyone, no background needed. Education, not medical advice.

3.4M views17 years ago1 recommendation

Brain and nervesNeuroscience

Beau Lotto uses interactive optical illusions to demonstrate how our brains evolved to perceive color and light based on context.

ted.com 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. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at ted.com/index.php/talks/top10 Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/tednews Checkout our Facebook page for TED exclusives facebook.com/TED

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended as an engaging and surprising explanation of how human visual perception and the brain work.

robomartinin Hacker News • Recommends

On “How do we see color?”

Color, Color Science, color vision, reproduction, perception, etc. often surprises engineers when they realize how incredibly complex the subject can be. Many years ago I took a course on Color Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I was working in a domain where I realized I had to know more about this subject than I could learn on my own at the time. This has come up many time during my career (even today). I am so glad I took the time to learn more about this from the folks who, quite literally, wrote the books on the subject (Fairchild, etc.). Here's a fun video to watch: link to this video Another interesting topic to understand: link
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just2nin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Can a Human See a Single Photon? (1996)”

I'm not sure I buy that it means there are more absolute viewable colors there, but rather there are merely different interpretations of the same colors. We do have fairly strong confirmation that our brain doesn't interpret color absolutely but can adjust based on luminescence (see: all examples of shadow illusions) and patterns (see: link to this video ), perhaps that's what is meant by a "fourth channel"?
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d0minein Hacker News • Mentions

On “"Hallucinating" AIs Sound Creative, but Let's Not Celebrate Being Wrong”

The same can be said about our brains too. What we think we see is quite different from what our eyes register (e.g., blind spot, hollow-face, colors on contrast backgrounds, etcc link to this video
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