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.
In my business I have studied a lot of that stuff, however I still love to see the illusions created by context, and how fun it is to experience first hand with simple exercises.
I was under the impression, prior to this talk, that our cones got over-excited when we stared at the dot between the two colors, and that it was the slow recess of that excitement that caused the color illusion to persist. But his explanation is much more consistent with the other experiments, showing that it is a result, not of weak hardware, but of extremely powerful software, as the brain steps in to tweak the info according to what it has inferred from the past. Scary stuff.
This talk is about optical illusions , but really, it is about how the brain works. Remember how the speaker explains that “context” is everything? Read the book “Management Rewired ” by Charles S. Jacobs, the book explains how to achieve and create “illlusions” in the corporate environment in order to get people to “see” what you want them to “see” by using stories to rewire the brain’s context. The more you repeat the story and reinforce it, the more it conditions the mind, just like what happened with the white dot between the green/red boxes.
This talk left me wanting much more about implications, consequences et al; this desire is both a good and a bad thing!
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