Magic http www youtube comwatch vAl CZ 3
Magic! • http: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Al. CZ 3 Vm Maf 4&list=PLKNk. Mwvum. Ph. I 3 CWtozh. H 7 q. P 75 Kz. Phv. E 1 w – Kevin James and the doctor trick
How the HECK do they do it? • Much of it has to do with the brain and what we pay attention to - our senses and our perception of reality
1) Pattern recognition • Our brains LOOK for patterns • Our brains look for the patterns to have meaning • Lots of info reaches the eye, but possibly 90% of it is lost by the time it reaches the brain • Therefore, the brain has to guess what a person sees based on past experiences ---- in other words, we actively construct our perception of reality. • Our perceptions of the world are hypotheses based on past experiences and stored information. • The formation of incorrect hypotheses will lead to errors of perception (e. g. visual illusions like the Necker cube). • Though the sensory information does not change, our perception does
2) Selective inattention or Inattentional Blindness - This is the ability to purposefully block out all but one bit of sensory input - to focus on one thing only. - Magicians try to focus your sensory input – you can’t notice everything! - this was seen in the experiment where a person in a penguin suit walked among the Jabbawockeez - The observers were to count basketball passes so they focused on that task. Most people never saw the penguin. - Attention is powerfully selective
Magic! • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=p. HKz 2 b. U 5 db. U • David Blaine – start at 2: 00
3) Change Blindness • It is often said that “seeing is believing”, indicating that visual perception is considered to be one of the most trustworthy means of obtaining information about the world, distorting little and missing less. • In spite of our strong impressions, however, research has shown that visual perception does not capture as much of the world as we think.
3) Change Blindness cont… • inability to notice some type of change • large changes that occur in clear view of an observer. • change blindness is believed to reflect limitations on the way we see • Visual attention is needed to see change
Magic! • https: //www. youtube. com/watc h? v=b. Vd 8 B 2 a. RAuk Charlie Caper
Your Perceptual Set “What do these letters spell? ” “How about these? ” “And what do these letters spell? ” “Finally , what do we call the white of an egg? ”
Your Perceptual Set cont… What we expect to see is often influenced by what is around us We have certain expectations based on what we know, our experiences etc Coke v. Pepsi v. generic – this test coming soon!
Perception is affected by Context • Top-down processing occurs when we are using perception • Situations can determine our perception – Studying should not occur while lying in bed. Students who do this often associate studying with sleeping because they study where they sleep. For effective studying, a designated place should be created where all the necessary supplies are available.
• A dog that climbs walls?
• nope
• A hairy conundrum
Perception is affected by Emotion - Emotions affect our perceptions - Researchers (Proffi tt, 2006 a, b; Schnall et al. , 2008) have demonstrated the power of emotions with different experiments showing that • walking destinations look farther away to those who have been fatigued by prior exercise. • a hill looks steeper to those who are wearing a heavy backpack or have just been exposed to sad, heavy classical music rather than light, bouncy music. • Emotions color our social perceptions, too. – Spouses who feel loved and appreciated perceive less threat in stressful marital events—“He’s just having a bad day” (Murray et al. , 2003) – Professional referees, if told a soccer team has a history of aggressive behavior, will assign more penalty cards after watching videotaped fouls (Jones et al. , 2002).
How would your perception change if you knew: : this is a group of friends on a pub crawl : this is a group of friends who have just passed their law exams for which they have been studying for weeks : this is a group of friends who are celebrating the life of another friend who just died from cancer
• Whose head is whose?
Magic! • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Ft 0 Rj. Jm. TSo girl who keeps changing
Eye Facts - - Your eyes start to develop two weeks after you are conceived. Your eyeballs stay the same size from birth to death, while your nose and ears continue to grow. An eye is composed of more than 2 million working parts. A fingerprint has 40 unique characteristics, but an iris has 256, a reason retina scans are increasingly being used for security purposes. “Red eye” occurs in photos because light from the flash bounces off the back of the eye. The choroid is located behind the retina and is rich in blood vessels, which make it appear red on film. 80% of what we learn is through our eyes. Seeing is such a big part of everyday life that it requires about half of the brain to get involved. Even if no one in the past few generations of your family had blue or green eyes, these recessive traits can still appear in later generations. Out of all the muscles in your body, the muscles that control your eyes are the most active. An eye cannot be transplanted. More than 1 million nerve fibers connect each eye to the brain and currently we’re not able to reconstruct those connections. 80% of our memories are determined by what we see Eyes are the second most complex organ after the brain.
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