Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Vision and Optical Illusions
Even though I initially felt a bit uneasy about the fact that my vision is only representing a “story” of what’s out there and not actual reality, I now understand why it must do this. Without construction, we would only perceive dots and meaningless information. Although this construction sometimes causes us to see our world in impossible and incorrect ways (e.g. the impossible arch), most of the time our brains' construction enables us to function and gives us useful information about the world around us. Also, the “story” our brains create and our sense of reality are checked by many other cues and sensory inputs. Taking all of these facts into consideration, I think that our visual system works in a very logical and efficient way.
I also found our discussion about optical illusions this week very interesting. I think that these ambiguous pictures are very fascinating because our brains can form more than one construction. I found it very interesting that in class, when looking at the optical illusions, it took me a long time to see the other possible construction. It seems that my brain constructed one image and held on to the belief that it was the actual and only possible image. In order to see the other possible construction, I either had to really concentrate on the image or I had look away from the image for a long time and suddenly look back. I think the idea that my brain stuck to its initial interpretation really shows why and how we have such a concrete and stable view of the world.