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.
Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see them
Comments
(38 Responses)
Wow
Interesting stuff.
Good Video!!
I like that a lot! …..Then the bees throw up, and thats honey…. lol!
Amazing I love this, thank you for sharing it xx
That was really interestin o.O
Wow I wanna wear one of those vision to sound things!
that was is very intresting.
Is this what Derrens new book is about? Sesory Perception. The use of our senses and perception of them to help us understand the world around us. If it is I cant wait to read it xx
Sorry about typo
Yes the Blind man who can sense objects with a clicking noise, like radar. Interesting stuff xx
Interesting stuff
Perception was one of my favourite topics in A-Level Psychology.
Fascinating,
You can’t beat TED for interesting and illuminating talks – made easy to understand for the likes of my simple brain!
Brilliant
Almost as entertaining as DB himself!
So I’m a realist….
sat through the hole video saying “what o.o”
need to learn some more..
eyes are actually amazing
Fascinating stuff! A few of those things are studied in most painting classes; how you can “fix” an error by surrounding your too-light or too-dark issue with its opposite. I’d love to take a class from this man.
Brilliant!
bit gross about the honey though lol Bee puke, yum.
Average… at best.
~Did anyone learn anything they didn’t learn when they were 10?
That was very cool.
I liked it. In particular the desert switching and the diamond flippy thing. Fun!
Love all this sort of thing and really enjoyed this.
LC x
That was very very good! Intellegent, entertainment brilliant
Is anyone else a little bit in love with this guy? Maybe its just me…
Love the TED talks, they have some amazing stuff on there.
I saw this on the TED website yesterday and thought you would post it
Amazing stuff, just shows how our perception of reality could be completely wrong. Our senses are our only way of observing the world, so the universe could actually be nothing like we think it is, yet our senses could put that ‘real’ information into a way we can understand it better (or have evolved to understand it). Makes me think of the old question of if my red is the same as everyone elses…
Bah its too late to be thinking about understand the universe… im going to bed…
watched all this was amazed what the eye can do to the brain clever this is better than all the god (boring) stuff @derren imagine staring out of someones eyes experiment will let your see soon
Hmm interesting stuff, the basic image n lighting stuff seem sound enough but that thing about the painting making the music was a bit ridiculous and an extraordinary claim like that as Derren says needs extraordinary evidence and yet none is offered we’re just simply told its true. I cant imagine that if they applied sound to color it would sound at all like that and at the very least some information on how exactly the sound was applied should have been offered.So for me it discredits a lot of the other claims apart from the basic illusions which are quite understandable but seems like theyve been used to pass of an extraoridinary claim without any real evidence. Would be interested to hear Derrens views on it..
Great presentation…love the Bees-part and the ending is Brilliant. I would love to know more about Bees and their patterns of vision and communication among eachother…seems to be very interesting and we might learn something from their ways!…
How interesting. The red and green bit was scary. I feel quite vulnerable!
That’s great, we’re just doing perception as our first topic in level 1 psych at uni. Ironically i’m missing it today because i have an eye infection in both eyes…
It does worry me a little that quite a lot of illusions just don’t work for me. why is that?
Oh and i shouldn’t have found the “no they weren’t BORN with numbers on them…” so funny.
x
Brilliant. I saw that the grey circles in the beginning were the same, but mostly because I was on the lookout for optical illusions and I linked my past experiences with them to this one.
In a way I demonstrated Beau Lotto’s point exactly: my brain used its past experiences to make sense of this one. However, because one (or more) of my past experiences included these optical illusions, they did not work as well as I would have liked: I kept second-guessing my sight. On the other hand my amazement (and thus my enjoyment) increased precisely because I knew what was happening: the extended rubix was great because I couldn’t believe that I was truly fooled, until I used Gimp to link the two squares.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CxM7a6CbyI&feature=related
Quite a few optical illusions round about this url on youtube. Quiet fun.
Really interesting, it shows your senses, just like memory, are not to be trusted.
Does anyone else think this guy has a really soothing voice?
Yeh, it sounds Dutch with a smidgen of Scottish mixed in with US too. Just to make sure all the options are covered.
“Only in uncertainty is there potential for understanding.” Wise words, eh..?
I love the psychology blog posts. Please keep them coming.
@DS: He does have a very soothing voice!
He does have a very soothing voice. Even when he says: “If you haven’t seen the predator yet, you’re dead!” I thought to myself ‘oh well, that’s a shame I suppose…’
This is great. I bet DB knows about the 1985 program on BBC Horizon – Colourful Notions, about how we see color. Youtube just took it down after Penn & Teller recommended it of gawkk. You should be able to find it to download if you just do a search for the title.