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aybala50's picture

If the brain takes offense does it hate the offender?

I really enjoyed our discussion in class about how weperceive the world as humans. I think that the idea that humans see the worldthe way they want to see it, not necessarily how it really is. In my opinion itmakes sense that the brain would give sense to things in this world that don’tmake sense otherwise. This could almost be considered a defense mechanism. Ifthe world around us is truly full of randomness and change, the human mind maynot be able to handle this. It is possible that humans are created to adjust toa certain world and continue growth through studies etc. If the constant changein the world distracted humans from this process we may have never evolved intowhat we are today. Also I don’t think that the human mind could handle thestress that would come along with constant shock caused by the constant changesin the world surrounding us. This is why I wanted to see, with the use of anoptical illusion picture, whether the fact that a picture fools or doesn’t foola person’s brain affects if they like optical illusions or not. 

I used this image of a young woman and an old woman: 

 

 

 

I asked 5 different questions to see which image a person sees or if they see both images. THen I asked whether they liked optical illusions. The results I came up with for which image is seen is shown in the graph below:

  

 

After figuring out how many people saw which image I wanted to see if there was a correlation between which image(s) was seen and if the person liked optical illusions.

 Person                     Which Image Was Seen Yes/No

1 Both Yes

2 Both Yes

3 Both Yes

4 Both Yes

5 Old Woman No

6 Both Yes

7 Both No

8 Old Woman Yes

9 Young Woman No

10 Both Yes

11 Both No

12 Both Yes

13 Young Woman No

14 Both Yes

15 Old Woman Yes 

 

Conclusion:

I believe that this survey wasn't very conclusive, or at least only a week correlational study. Most of the subjects that could see both images reported that they like optical illusions (8 out of 10). Some of the subjects who were only able to see one of the images in the picture reported that they don't enjoy optical illusions, while the others reported that they did (3/2). 

There could be a weak correlation here, but I couldn't say whether this was true or not. The results are not strong enough for me to say so, but I think that if I had given the survey to more than 15 subjects, my results may have been more conclusive.

So, I can't really use this correlational study to say whether humans who's brain are tricked dislike optical illusions, or to say whether humans who manage to solve an optical illusion enjoy optical illusions.  

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