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katherine's picture

Seeing is believing

In class we looked at the pictures that had more than one image in them.  Initially, some people were able to see the skull or the woman, but eventually everyone was able to see both.  How?  This concept reminds me of an article I read a few weeks back about face recognition.  The article discussed humans' ability to see faces in non-human objects such as clouds, potato chips, the moon, etc.  Now knowing about how we are able to fill in missing pieces in our vision to make a complete picture, this article makes more sense to me because I now know that people.  It also made me think of all the times that we try to associate objects with something with which we are familiar.  For example, when you're looking at clouds with someone and they point out a cloud that looks like a certain object to them, it might take you a second to see what they are seeing.  However, after you've looked at it in a different way or they have explained it, you're usually able to see what they are talking about--the same thing happens with the picture of the woman in the mirror and skull.  It is amazing that our brain is able to see things in multiple different ways. 
But do we just assume that everyone is seeing the same thing or are we all really seeing the same thing?  Perhaps we all just think that we are describing and looking about the same thing the same way; it is only until a picture such as the skull/woman is presented when the difference between what we see comes out.

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