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Congwen Wang's picture

What we see is what we think we see

After our very interesting vision experiment, I was surprised at how sophisticated our brain is, and how we are all constantly "deceived" by ourselves.  After class, I did that cross and dot experiment again with a piece of paper full of text, and it turned out that my brain actually filled in some text at the blindspot. This reminds me that when I was little, I once wondered why we couldn't recall every detail of a picture even though we remembered the image.  Now it all make sense - we can't recall the details because we never really remembered them. Perhaps this is why our brains can process images so fast? I often play with Photoshop, and it sometimes frustrates me because the image files can be very space consuming. Apparently computer softwares don't use the same image saving mechanism as we do. I guess our brains must be very good at selectively storing certain parts of images, so we could have an outline of the scene but wouldn't be fatigued by those trivial details.

And the checkboard. I tried to drag the B square in and out of the board very slowly, and was amazed to see (at least I felt I did) the gradual change of color when it was passing through the grid. I think I can never look at my brain the same as I used to anymore.

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