@flameroller

well maybe if we all donate because of how much we enjoy these informative videos the budget will be able to cover a dyno and an air exchanger to show the tire rim example ^^

Great videos. I put them on JREF forum.

@AchievementSpanker `No no no absolutely not. We can definitely trust our senses to live and survive, that’s the point. He just saying that our brain through evolution gives us a certain perception and that we can change the way we look at things to understand more about science. As far as everything being an illusion, that implies that you are talking only about one sense of sight and perception of these visual images in the brain which I suppose I believe is not true or how could we read.

@bradmanthethird The interesting thing is that not everyone’s brain works in exactly the same way, all the time. I did actually have to force the spinning wire diamond to change direction, but what he was showing is exactly the same thing, as watching the spokes on a bicycle wheel or a car tire. The center will randomly switch between clockwise and counter clockwise. I would have told him to use my example because it is more obvious.

@bradmanthethird I had to watch it over and over to try to get it to flip. It certainly doesn’t happen as often as he said it does. It might flip once during the whole time, if you try hard. Although, if you look at the string, that was always going clockwise, even when the diamond looked to be going counterclockwise. Since they have to be spinning in the same direction, it was going clockwise.

@cbernier3

it wasn’t obvious to me that it was always spinning clockwise, maybe you just saw it spinning clockwise because your brain knew it should be? unless your very genetically unique from the rest of us, your eyes should not actually be able to see the direction of spin on an object going that fast from that far away, multiple experiments conclude that a giant chunk of what we think we see is really just our brain interpreting sight information and trying to make sense of it.

@QuasiMolko he probably had things to do in his life..

Quite interesting, but i missed what his point really was. That we do not observe the world as it is but rather as we’ve been trained to do? A weak point.

Great post, really gets you thinking about “reality”.

I’ve often wondered if different people have a different experience of colour. For example what I experience as red some one else may experience what I would call blue but since we label the same thing as red we both agree it’s red (ie: we agree on “reality” even though our experiences of it may be totally different). Unfortunately I don’t think the idea is testable.

I never trusted the bastards anyway!
Every time I look in a mirror, my eyes look shifty.
They’re up to something, I know it.

@Eagle0600 Yeah, I know that that’s what I’m supposed to see but I didn’t – think it might be because my brain is expecting the illusion and correcting for it (if such a thing is even possible).

@DigitizedSelf: Really? I saw them as startlingly different. My brain is basically telling me: “Look, see that yellow haze, that’s discolouring the squares which must really be purple!” Except that my brain does this instantaneously.

very cool!