Seeing the World as it Isn't

           The link below is a Ted talk by Daniel Simons.  His presentation stresses the fact that the way we perceive the world, may be different than the world that actually exists.  He opens his talk with a street art illusion.  A chalk artists draws a picture of what looks like a girl in a swimming pool with her leg up in the air.  There also appears to be a man who is sticking his foot in the water.  Everything in the chalk art appears to be three-dimentional from a certain angle.  However, if we simply look at the art from a different angle, it is clearly not the same.  Everything was drawn in a distorted way so that people would perceive it as three-dimentional chalk art.
            Simons also included some of the illusions that we looked at in class.  He showed two of the same picture, one with a dark background and one with a light background.  We know that because of the dark background, the image in the middle looks light and because of the light background, the image in the middle looks dark.  In reality, both middle images are exactly the same color.
            This Ted talk stresses the fact that we each perceive the world differently because we each process information and images differently.  He explains, "two people looking at exactly the same world can be taking in different information."  This means that two people looking at exactly the same thing can be perceiving it completely differently.  The way we see the world all depends on the way we take in information and how we perceive the things that we are looking at.

Seeing the World as it Isn't Daniel Simons